Week 1: Who mops
The opening lecture — the size of the volunteer workforce that maintains the internet's reference layer, and why no institution has ever tried to train it
22 February 2027
English Wikipedia carries around seven million articles. Roughly thirty thousand people edit it more than five times in a given month, and around three thousand edit it more than a hundred times. Divide the articles by the second number and you have the course in a single ratio: a reference work consulted billions of times a month, maintained by a workforce that would fit in a football stadium and leave most of the seats empty.
Run the same arithmetic on Reddit, on OpenStreetMap, on the package registry your last project pulled four hundred dependencies from. The shape holds. A very small number of unpaid people are doing a very large amount of unglamorous, repetitive, contested work, and they learned to do it by doing it badly in public and being corrected by strangers.
Every other kind of maintenance labour society depends on has a training pathway, a ticket, a first-year apprentice wage. This one has a help page nobody reads and a revert.
That is the gap this course exists to close, and the School of Invented Disciplines would like it noted that we got here first.
Outline#
- the arithmetic: readers, articles, active editors, and the ratio between them
- four projects, one labour pattern: Wikipedia, Reddit, OSM, a package registry
- what “unpaid” does and does not mean — gift, hobby, obligation, second job
- the newcomer cliff: why roughly nine in ten first-time contributors never return after their first month
- what you will have done by week 12, and what you will have signed to do it
Teaching team
- Dr Prue Ashgrove — Convenor