Community Insights: What did we learn last year, and what’s coming in 2022?

Hello to all from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Data & Insights team! In case you missed it, the team published the Community Insights 2021 survey report in May 2021. The Foundation has conducted the survey since 2016 and uses the results to help inform initiatives across the organization. Things like:

• #WikiHerStory and Addressing Wikipedia’s gender gap by showing where women are leading in our movement and where they are still underrepresented.
• The Universal Code of Conduct, by illuminating experiences of harassment among various contributor roles.
• As well as highlighting the underrepresentation of contributors who identify as Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino/a/x in the United States as we celebrated Black History Month in February 2021 and Latinx Heritage Month in September 2021. 

2021 Report Highlights

Some key findings from this year’s report: 

• Newcomers’ sense of empowerment increased in 2020, especially among contributors who identify as women and those who live in East Asia and emerging geographies. 
• Both feelings of engagement and feelings of belonging among contributors showed a modest improvement since 2019.
• Nevertheless, our Movement often appears as a microcosm of broader inequalities across the globe: in 2020, as in previous years, people living in Asia and especially Africa were dramatically underrepresented among Wikimedia contributors.

For more information and details, read the report on Meta and explore the data from the Collaboration, Diversity, & Inclusion supplement yourself via Google data studio.

Upcoming Changes for 2022 and Beyond

This year, we will be making some adjustments to how we conduct the Community Insights survey, both in the short term and in the long term. There are two things we will be changing. We are exploring new ways to recruit contributors to take the survey in order to get a more holistic and accurate picture of our Movement. We will reduce the number of questions to lessen the burden on survey participants. 

While we work on these longer-term changes for next year’s survey, we will temporarily narrow the focus of Community Insights. In the coming year the survey will be narrowed to items critical for Thriving Movement evaluation and demographics. This allows us to maintain this vital source of information about who makes up our Movement today, and who still needs to be welcomed into it. You can view the timeline of changes on the Community Insights page. The biggest immediate change is that we will not send out the abbreviated survey until the first half of 2022.

Want to help make Community Insights better?

We are interested in collaborating with community members in the review of upcoming changes and gathering feedback about the Community Insights survey’s design! If you’d like to help us pilot questions, ensure demographic questions make sense and are relevant for your language and context, or contribute in another way, come join the conversation on our talk page! If you prefer for us to email you individually, you can fill out this Google Form (Privacy Statement), and if you would just like to stay informed of the upcoming changes for now, follow the Community Insights calendar.