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New post: How can a volunteer project keep going when your experienced volunteers are exhausted, trust is short in supply & you’re facing tremendous pressure in a situation ripe for catastrophe?
Lessons from the Ukrainian Wikipedia during the Russian invasion.
https://citizensandtech.org/2026/11/leadership-succession-in-online-communities/
The problem of succession isn't unique to Wikipedia or open source.
Using nonprofit tax registration data, social scientists have computed the "dissolution rate" of orgs that fail to outlive their initial founders.
In an analysis of UK charities, orgs that appointed a higher proportion of new people to leadership roles are multiples less likely to dissolve, holding constant for differences in the economic conditions of a region. To estimate this, researchers compute the "appointment ratio" - the proportion of new leaders in a period of time.
Ukrainian Wikipedia was forced to change how they onboarded new leaders when Russia invaded in 2022.
Many volunteers shifted efforts to support neighbors, help people escape harm's way, and in some cases take up arms.
During the battle of Kharkiv, one editor, a librarian, set up an editing station in a bomb shelter to keep doing his work and maintaining Wikipedia.
Wikimedia's community blog Diff has documented years of extraordinary stories from the Ukrainian community.
I wrote this post in response to a Wikimedia movement gathering on how to handle the challenge of making Wikipedia a mulit-generational endeavor as key leaders age and retire.
As of Nov 2024, 13 out of 21 large Wikipedias had declining numbers of unique monthly active admins, and the remaining leaders are taking on more and more responsibility.
This has all the hallmarks of what social scientists call a spiral of "key-person concentration" that can be hard to reverse.