The annual Wikipedia Day meetup builds community among volunteers, new and old

By Calan Pittis

On Jan. 14, the Toronto WikiClub held its annual meetup at One Yonge Community Centre, bringing together Wikipedia users and volunteers from around Canada.

It was part of a week of celebrations for Wikipedia’s 24th anniversary. Meetups were held in England, Nigeria, and more than half a dozen U.S. states, but the Toronto WikiClub meetup was the only official Wikipedia Day celebration in Canada.

Veteran editors and newbies alike attended this year’s meet-up. This included English-language Wikipedia administrator Hannah Clover, who goes by the username Clovermoss on the website. 

In 2024, Clover was named Wikimedian of the Year, an annual award celebrating Wikimedia volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation is the larger body that operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. Clover is the youngest person to ever receive the award, earning it when she was just 21. The Wikimedia Foundation flew her to Katowice, Poland, to accept the award at Wikimania, the foundation’s annual conference.

“Until I actually got the award, I was supposed to keep it a secret, right?” Clover said. “So I spent that month kind of feeling a bit like a ticking time bomb where I’m like, ‘something really important is about to happen to me, but I can’t say anything about it’”.

Clover made the comparatively shorter trek from her home in the Niagara Region to downtown Toronto to attend this year’s WikiClub meetup, and it’s not hard to see why. For many of its volunteers, Wikipedia is a personal and emotional thing. Getting the chance to talk about it with like-minded people in person is very valuable.

“The social element of the community is a huge thing for me,” said Clover. “It’s like a global book club.”

The meetup is the one time of year when the WikiClub can add new members. Among these new inductees was Paul Baculna.

“I saw a banner that said ‘you’re invited to Toronto WikiClub’s meet up’, and I was very interested,” said Baculna.

Normally, information about events for the WikiClub is only put out to people who are already on the club’s mailing list. This means it’s very hard for people who don’t already know about the club to join in and participate. For the annual Wikipedia Day meetup, however, digital banners are posted on Wikipedia for users across Canada.

Baculna is a volunteer with Connexions, an archive which describes itself as being ‘dedicated to keeping alive the rich history of grassroots movements for social justice’. Connexions itself also operates its own digital encyclopedia.

Baculna normally uses Wikipedia as part of keeping up with current events, as well as in his role with the archive, but the meetup offered him a new opportunity.

“I [was] interested in meeting the people, seeing what their backgrounds [are], their motivations, and putting a face to those usernames,” said Baculna.

This was the WikiClub’s second meetup after the club was revived in 2023 following the Wikiconference North America, which was held in Toronto, and it’s been growing ever since.

This year, nearly a hundred people of all ages, backgrounds, genders and political affiliations signed up for the event. So many, in fact, that the organizers had to pull out extra chairs and tables to accommodate everyone who turned out.

“It was fascinating to actually see the types of people that were there,” said Baculna.

“It was quite varied. From the newer ones kind of like me and the ones who have spent a good portion of their time doing it,” Baculna added.

A big topic of conversation at the meetup was to find ways that Toronto, and Canada more broadly, can contribute to the future growth and development of Wikipedia.

Andrew Leung was one of the coordinators of this year’s meet-up.

“We always want to increase our contributor base from Canada,” said Leung.

“Topics all tend to be over-dominated by American contributors writing about the U.S.”

Wikipedia is entirely managed by volunteers, and it’s available in more than 300 languages. Each language becomes its own dedicated version of Wikipedia, so it relies on people who speak that language to build it nearly from the ground up.

This makes Toronto’s linguistic and cultural diversity valuable for growing other language versions of Wikipedia. It can also counteract one of Wikipedia’s most troublesome issues: Community Capture.

Sometimes, users who share a language will attempt to take over that language’s Wikipedia. This can come in the form of government interference or grassroots takeovers, like when a group of far right nationalists took over Croatian Wikipedia.

Leung used Japan as a hypothetical example.

“Japanese is only used primarily in Japan so, if the government somehow decides to go rogue and forces people to have certain views and update the Wikipedia then it could be very prone to interference,” said Leung.

“One way to kind of guard against this so-called ‘community capture’ is to have

a diversified editor base with those editors that are outside of those countries,” he shared.

By embracing the multicultural and multilingual nature of Toronto, Leung and other members of the club hope to help undermine attempts at community capture, as well as improve the overall quality of non-English Wikipedias. At the meet-up, members of the Toronto WikiClub discussed hosting multilingual edit-a-thons to improve as many non-English articles as possible.

Being the only Canadian Wikipedia Day meetup, The Toronto WikiClub also hosted a virtual meeting for Wikipedia editors from the territories. This included a video call with Alan Sim, a 68-year-old resident of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut who goes by CambridgeBayWeather on Wikipedia. Sim has more than a quarter of a million edits under his belt. 

Like Clover, Sim is also one of only 847 English Language Wikipedia users who have undergone the extensive process to gain the role of administrator. This includes a week-long question period where other editors can vet the new applicant, followed by a vote where the new administrator must win by a supermajority.

The meetup wasn’t without its flashpoints either. Discussions about editorial philosophy and the use of artificial intelligence took place. There was also a presentation on the history of Wikipedia, including some of its most notable controversies. Among these was the story of a forty thousand word debate between Wikipedia editors regarding, of all things, the semantics of the title of the film Star Trek Into Darkness.

Leung has seen that these tensions can do numbers on a volunteer’s will to contribute.

“Sometimes people feel burned out, either from writing or having conflicts with other editors,” said Leung.

Leung hopes that raising awareness for some of Wikimedia’s other volunteer-led projects can help combat this burnout. Projects like WikiVoyage, a free online travel guide, or Wikinews, a news website.

He also hopes that meetups like this will help to foster a strong community that will keep people engaged and energized.

“[The meetups are] trying to build a cohesion of a group of like-minded volunteers with a common goal, which is editing Wikipedia,” said Leung.

“To have a sense of belonging and kind of organize activities to hopefully act as a retention tool to keep them interested in continuing their contribution in Wikipedia.”

For Paul Baculna, this seems to have worked.

“Whenever you’re starting something, there’s always this hesitancy to start,” said Baculna. “Having actual people in that community, having those people in person to encourage you, it has that stronger feeling of reassurance.”

Wikipedia has also provided Hannah Clover with a sense of community and belonging.

“A lot of people are super nerdy, and it feels like you found people that get you, that understand you,” said Clover.

For her, it also goes deeper than the connections she makes with others.

“I feel like a lot of people search for meaning in their lives…” Clover mentioned, “…when I was working at McDonald’s, I mean it didn’t feel like I was doing anything that important on a global scale, so editing with Wikipedia definitely fulfills some of those inner desires about just making a difference.”

The Toronto WikiClub lives up to its name. It reflects and values the diversity found in the city of Toronto and fosters a sense of community with respect for that diversity. 

It also felt like a meetup for all of Canada. Attendees lived as far south as the U.S. border and as far north as the Arctic Circle. Most Canadian of all, however, is Clover’s favourite work on Wikipedia.

“I wrote the article for ketchup chips,” she said. “[it’s] probably the most comprehensive page on the web about ketchup chips, and I’m very proud of it.”