Volunteers - still not free! Even at Wikipedia!
12:46, 19 October 2010
.. Posted in Volunteerism and Volunteer Management0 trackbacks
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Wikipedia is free. It has more than 12 million articles that you can access free of charge. It's a web site maintained by more than 100,000 online volunteers, who create articles and translate them into over 265 languages. Wikipedia/Wikimedia may not call its contributors online volunteers, but that's what they are, and that makes Wikipedia/Wikimedia the world's largest online volunteering endeavor.
Unlike most organizations that involve volunteers, Wikipedia doesn't screen the majority of its volunteers; anyone can go in an edit just about any article, any time he or she wants to. You want to volunteer for Wikipedia, you just start editing or writing any article. That makes it micro-volunteering, the hot new term for short-term episodic online volunteering.
But, wait -- maybe it's not free...
The Register, or "El Reg" as its loyal readers call it, reported in January 2009 that Wikipedia/Wikimedia had estimated that it needed just under $6m to fund its operations through June 30, the end of its fiscal 2008/2009 year.
So, Wikipedia is not free. It has expenses.
Nearly half of that ($2.7m) was for technology expenses. But, why does Wikipedia need to pay any paid staff? After all, volunteers are FREE, right? And Wikipedia doesn't get bogged down with all that traditional volunteer management stuff, like screening and ensuring quality among volunteer contributions, right, so need for any staff to do those things? No need to fund any volunteer management?
Wrong.
It takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and expertise to wrangle more than 100,000 online volunteers and all that they do on behalf of an organization -- even if Wikipedia doesn't call them volunteers, and even if most people at the organization don't consider themselves volunteer managers.
In addition, while just to edit Wikipedia doesn't require any screening or supervision on the part of Wikipedia, Wikipedia does have volunteers that help in the management of the site and, indeed, the organization screens and supervises those high-responsibility online volunteers -- just like any nonprofit organization does.
No, volunteers are not free, not even so-called micro-volunteers. I've said it before, and before that and... well, you get the idea. And I guess I'll keep saying it until I stop hearing people say, "Volunteers are great because they're free!"
On a related note: last year, I joined a Wikimedia task force - specifically, the Community Health Task Force. Here are my favorite recommendations. Note that one of them is my own proposal regarding volunteer recognition for Wikimedia onlien volunteers.
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