Research:Volunteer Archetypes
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
In support of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission to nurture multiple generations of volunteers, a pillar of the 2024-25 annual plan, the Volunteer Archetypes research project aims to study the motivations and practices of online volunteers who are not currently represented in our movement. Archetypes aims to identify motivational patterns among these non-Wikimedian volunteers and to present WMF leadership with opportunities, or "value propositions," that might be effective at enticing certain types of non-Wikimedian volunteers to contribute to our projects.
The final output of this research will be a series of "persona-like" informational profiles of volunteer archetypes that presents their motivational patterns in conjunction with other information about the ways they contribute their time and skills in online spaces. These cards will also present information about archetypes' measured relationships with Wikipedia. These Archetypes will are intended to help WMF teams better be able to talk about—and talk to—their varied constituencies, and to begin catering more effectively to different kinds of volunteers by orienting to the different value propositions that attract them.
Methods
editThis project is organized around the distribution of a survey distributed to people who indicate some degree of online contribution without being paid in return; i.e., some form of online "volunteering."
Through a process of internal consultations with project stakeholders, the WMF Design team, and the WMF Research team, we settled on asking respondents about the following forms of contribution:
- Participating in community or citizen science projects (e.g., iNaturalist, eBird)
- Submitting reviews (e.g., Google Maps, Local Guides, Yelp)
- Providing help or answering questions (e.g., Facebook groups, Quora, Reddit, Discord servers)
- Community moderation (e.g., subreddits, Discord channels, or similar)
- Contributing to open-source software projects (e.g., Wikipedia, GitHub, OpenStreetMap, etc.)
- Liking or sharing posts on social media
- Posting in hobby- or interest-based communities (music, art, photography, design, gaming, etc.)
- Promoting or supporting social, political, or cultural causes
- Academic volunteering (e.g., course creation, tutoring)
- Online organizing of events (virtual meetups, gaming events, film festivals, art shows, etc.)
- Preserving or documenting cultural heritage (digitizing documents, artifacts, underrepresented groups, etc.)
- Other (please state): [text entry]
After progressing through a screener survey, qualified respondents are asked to "select all" of the above contribution forms they engage in, and in a subsequent screen are asked to select which of their choices is "the most important" to them. After this, they respond to a number of questions about their motivations, behaviors, and beliefs around their "most important" form of contribution. They are also asked questions about their relationship to Wikipedia.
Timeline
editThe first version of this research (V1) was completed in mid-July, 2024. It resulted in the elaboration of 6 volunteer archetypes, and was presented by the WMF Design team at Wikimania 2024 in Poland.
The second version (V2) represents an extension of V1, and is anticipated to conclude by the end of the 2024 calendar year. V2 aims to extend V1 by strengthening the empirical basis of the Archetypes, including input from online contributors who speak French, Spanish, and Arabic, and providing more nuance in the way that respondents' contribution behaviors and Wikipedia relationships are measured.
Results
editThe V1 Archetypes cards can be viewed and downloaded on Wikimedia Commons. The V2 deliverable is anticipate to resemble V1 structurally, although data-based details and the distribution of individual archetypes are expected to differ.
Broadly speaking, we have found that respondents who self-select into what we are considering to be "generalized" forms of online contribution, i.e.,
- Submitting reviews (e.g., Google Maps, Local Guides, Yelp),
- Providing help or answering questions (e.g., Facebook groups, Quora, Reddit, Discord servers), and
- Liking or sharing posts on social media,
generally tend of "behave" differently than respondents who self-select into more "specialized" forms of contribution, which include the remaining 8 contribution types listed above. Specialist contributors tend to spend more effort on their chosen contribution form, report different and stronger motivations to do it, and report a different and stronger relationship with Wikipedia. Furthermore, a respondent's choice of individual contribution form tends to be associated with patterns of motivation and behavior as measured elsewhere in the survey. "Hobby posters," for example, tend to be motivated by factors such as fun and community, while "social cause promoters" tend to be motivated to contributed by positivist social values.
As work on V2 continues, we are further exploring these relationships and sub-dividing our participants into Archetypes (likely reduced to 5 in V2) that can help WMF strategic decision-makers during their annual planning processes.
Resources
edit- 2024 Wikimania presentation
- V1 Archetypes
- V2 Archetypes [in progress]