[hootz]

Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.

[1970-01-01]

Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.

Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:

"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."

https://www.wikipedia.org/#:~:text=We%20ask%20you%2C%20since...

[britta]

If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!

The foundation's 2026-2027 draft annual plan explains a bit of their current strategy for recruiting more editors, including by deepening engagement among readers in meaningful ways: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

[red-iron-pine]

money is an easy thing to contribute, and they make it frictionless.

volunteering to edit / update / battle / ameliorate wiki pages requires far more time and friction and often drama

[hootz]

But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.

Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.