A lesson on resilient knowledge organizations from Ukrainian Wikipedia
"How can a volunteer project keep going when your experienced volunteers are exhausted, trust is short in supply & you’re facing tremendous pressure in a situation ripe for catastrophe?" Ukrainian Wikipedia has some answers.
An interesting dive into what happened to the Ukrainian Wikipedia in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion, told with characteristic care by CAT Lab’s J. Nathan Matias.
“Inside Ukraine, people desperately needed to understand the changing circumstances of the war. Outside of Ukraine, the world flocked to information sources like Wikipedia to learn about the people and places facing the violence we saw on our screens. In the weeks following the invasion, viewership of the Ukrainian language Wikipedia increased by millions.”
At the same time, as you might expect under the circumstances, the number of active contributors plummeted. Wikipedia lives or dies based on its contributions and its editorial process — and Ukrainian attention was diverted elsewhere. Still, a dedicated core remained, and stories like the librarian who contributed edits from a bomb shelter are remarkable.
But the point here isn’t just to highlight the dedication of the volunteers keeping trustworthy information online even as the immediate world around them succumbed to war. It’s a lesson about succession. Our information ecosystem is vulnerable to a diminishing pipeline of administrators, editors, and dedicated contributors; the number of admins in particular is shrinking across Wikipedia. How can we fix that?
In Ukraine, they added a new probationary admin role:
“To fill the urgent need for admins, the Ukrainian Wikipedia created a “temporary administrator role” the day after the invasion. Rather than use their normal extended discussion and voting process, leaders quickly appointed new admins after a 3 day discussion period and [gave] a probationary period of 1-2 months, with the option to extend.”
They basically created an apprenticeship, designed to try someone out, help teach them the skills, and most importantly, demonstrate and build trust. (It also had a quick escape hatch if they turned out to be untrustworthy.) The result: 20% more admins within months.
The full post dives into the lessons to be learned for organizations like Wikipedia in useful detail. There are deeper lessons to be learned for other community spaces too, including in news and journalism. The stat about non-profits without leadership succession being around three times more likely to close is striking; how many non-profit newsrooms have a plan in place?
We often talk about building the organizations and the platform stacks that they depend on. We talk less about ensuring there’s a pipeline for succession to safeguard their sustainability — or the layers of carefully designed community-building and socialization that this requires.
Every leader should be engaged in the work of planning for succession and, ideally, designing their own obsolescence — even when times are hard. That’s as true for volunteer organizations like Wikipedia and organic online communities as anywhere else.
