Bridging the offline and online: 20 years of offline meeting data of the German-language Wikipedia

Abstract

Abstract Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites worldwide. Thousands of volunteers are contributing to it daily, making it an example of how productive non-market collaboration on a very wide scale is not only viable but also sustainable. Wikipedia’s freely available data on the online actions conducted make it a popular source of data, particularly for computer scientists and computational social scientists. This data brief will present the dewiki meetup dataset which covers the offline component of the German-language version of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia: informal offline gatherings between Wikipedia contributors. These gatherings are organised online and information about who is attending them, where they take place and what has happened at these meetings is shared publicly. The dewiki meetup dataset covers almost 20 years of offline activity of the German-language Wikipedia, containing 4418 meetups that have been organised with information on attendees, apologies, date and place of meeting, and minutes recorded. It is a valuable source of data for social science research: it captures the development of the offline network over time of one of the largest and most sustainable online public goods and communities. The data can easily be merged with online activity data on Wikipedia which allows us to bridge the gap between offline and online behaviour.