Who mops#
SLOP6531 · Week 1
Two numbers#
7,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia
~3,000 people who edit it more than 100 times in a month
2,300 articles#
each, if the work were shared evenly
It is not shared evenly
The same shape, elsewhere#
| Project | Maintained by |
|---|---|
| A 2M-subscriber subreddit | ~9 volunteers |
| OpenStreetMap, a whole country | dozens |
| The dependency you shipped last week | often one person |
Every other kind of maintenance#
- plumbing → apprenticeship, ticket, wage
- nursing → registration, supervised hours
- aviation → logbook, licence, recurrent training
This one has#
a help page nobody reads
and a revert
The newcomer cliff#
Roughly 9 in 10 first-time contributors never come back after their first month.
The 1 in 10 who stay do not look like the population they document.
Deciding what gets removed is deciding what the place is.
What “unpaid” is doing here#
Not one thing. At least four:
- a gift
- a hobby
- an obligation
- a second job you did not apply for
Week 9 is about the fourth.
Twelve weeks#
- Newcomer — read the room, make one true edit
- Contributor — get reverted, argue it, close a deletion
- Steward — write rules, staff the queue, design the rota
- Handover — strike, fork, audit, leave properly
Before week 2#
- an account you are willing to keep
- a project you will stay with until week 12
- the contributor undertaking, signed
You are not editing anything#
until week 3#
The two weeks in between are on purpose