2023 talk:Program/Equity and Community Health/XLRRDF-A new approach to contributor growth in Africa

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Causes of lack of contributors in Africa[edit source]

If we are going to talk about contributor growth in Africa, it might make sense to first to try and agree what the main causes are of the lack of contributors. I'm aware of the following explanations:

  1. Greater use of Open Proxies in Africa, despite Wikipedia usually blocking them see 2023:Program/Submissions/The effects of IP address range blocking on the Global South - 8FCWJD
  2. In at least some African countries the main device for accessing the internet is a smartphone rather than a PC. So a side effect of the Mobile view being even more reader optimised than the PC view is that it weakens our community in Africa
  3. Founder effect problems - Much of the Wikipedia editing community joined in the 2000s, before the Internet really took off in Africa. So part of the problem is the lack of openess of the community to a new generation of editors, many of whom happen to be from Africa.
  4. Editing an online encyclopaedia is not an activity for first time users of the internet. Long ago in my IT marketing days we had a rule of thumb that people would use the internet for a couple of years before they were ready to get into online shopping. I don't know if that rule of thumb still holds true or what the equivalent is for editing Wikipedia. But I'm very sure that there is going to be a delay between a community coming online and some of that community getting involved in Wikipedia
  5. Digital divide - most of us start editing on topics that are local to us, and in Africa there are fewer online sources available, so new editors in Africa are more likely to have sourcing problems
  6. Generational divide. While the first generation of Wikipedians skewed young, other global north volunteer communities generally skew towards the elderly and retired as they have most spare time; and the Wikipedia community in the global north is greying and looking more and more like a typical volunteer community. Do those cultural norms also apply in Africa, and if so is part of the problem simply a lack of internet use among the elderly in Africa? When Wikipedia launched in 2001 the internet community still skewed young, and "silver surfers" retired people using the internet were a rare and new but fast growing phenomenon.

I doubt that all of the above are of equal importance. WereSpielChequers (talk) 08:23, 30 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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