Hannah Clover was just 16 years old back in 2018 when she noticed an error in a Wikipedia entry for a song she had just listened to.
She hopped on the site, taking the username, Clovermoss, and made a quick change to the entry. Since then, the now-21-year-old Niagara resident has made more than 24,000 edits to the English Wikipedia pages and has added administrator rights to her portfolio, which includes advanced permissions that allow her to do a lot of work behind the scenes, cleaning up pages and generally doing the work to protect the platform from online trolls and misinformation.
As a result of her efforts, Clover was named the 2024 Wikimedia of the Year. She is the youngest ever in the 13-year history of the award.
Accepting the award on Aug. 7 at the annual WikiMania Conference in Katowice, Poland, Clover said her output prompted other admins on the platform, through email and at an in-person conference to urge her to submit her name to become one herself.
“I had a bunch of people kind of gang up on me, I'm talking ambushing me in hotel lobbies, saying you need to run, and I guess, in retrospect that kind of gave me the courage to do so.”
In addition to her normal administration role with the platform, Clover has been working on what is called the Editor Reflections Project, where she has gathered more than 200 stories and experiences of English Wikipedia editors, helping to compile knowledge and foster a sense of community among contributors. She also mentors new editors through her work on the platform’s “Newbie Central” pages.
“I actually kind of got the inspiration for it at my very first meetup, which happened last year at WikiConference North America,” Clover said. “It was great meeting people and sharing stories, and it's just that sort of dynamic conversation you get when you connect names to faces that you've seen online for years.”
Awards are handed out annually to volunteers who have made exceptional contributions to the Wikimedia projects. Winners are recognized across several categories, from new contributors to long-time volunteers. The Wikimedian of the Year is selected personally by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who started the platform in 2002, a year before Clover was born.
“Sometimes I tease other admins,” Clover said during her acceptance interview with the event's hosts. “I'll show them baby pictures. I started editing Wikipedia on Sept. 16, 2018, 13 days after I turned 16, so I have always lived in a world with Wikipedia.”
Wales, meanwhile, had high praise for Clover.
“She embodies many of the best qualities of our movement, support for newcomers, the joy of not only editing, but also reflecting on what it means to be a Wikimedian,” he said.
The platform now enlists the efforts of nearly 300,000 volunteers who help create and curate the information on Wikimedia projects, which are viewed more than 22 billion times worldwide every month.
