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by britta 24 days ago
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_...