The edit button nobody clicks: short-form video, creator-gen volunteers, and Wikipedia's recruitment gap
Wikipedia's contributor base is ageing and shrinking. Meanwhile, a generation of knowledge creators (fluent in TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels) is producing, curating, and fact-checking information at scale, just not *here*. This lightning talk asks why, and whether it matters.
The short-form video question is deliberately controversial within the Wikimedia movement: proposals to surface Wikipedia content through video have met resistance on grounds of quality control, platform dependency, closed formats, and alignment with commercial AI pipelines. This talk treats that controversy not as a problem to resolve but as a research question to examine. What does the evidence tell us about why younger and creator-generation contributors don't engage with Wikipedia as editors? Is the barrier technical, cultural, epistemic, or structural? And what would genuinely community-governed, open short-form contribution actually look like, if it's possible at all?
Rather than advocating for or against video, this talk maps the tension: between Wikipedia's commitment to openness and its dependence on contribution models that systematically exclude newer creator cultures. The goal is to open a research agenda; on recruitment, format, epistemic norms, and platform politics but also on multimodality, and broader critical digital and AI literacies; these are questions I believe the movement urgently needs to tackle but has so far largely avoided.
**Format note:** This talk will use concrete data points on contributor demographics and trends, brief examples of creator-gen knowledge practices from adjacent platforms, and a set of open research questions designed to provoke discussion.
