The Community Behind Wikipedia
I was pleasantly surprised to find more than a hundred referer hits from Pajamas Media’s post about Wikipedia. I disagree with some of the information in their post and feel like I should clarify a few things. Some people I’ve been talking to recently seem to have the same misperceptions.
"Wikipedia is … written in secret by anyone with a keyboard, whose identities cannot be learned even by Wikipedia’s owners"
While this might be the case with many edits, it is not the case with all. An impressive community of people care for the Wikimedia Foundation sites, including Wikipedia. It’s not an entirely anonymous effort by complete strangers or people who wish to remain anonymous. Yes, there are many anonymous contributors, but it’s not the phantom effort some people seem to think it is. And it isn’t one guy in a basement plunking away on a keyboard, either.
It’s possible to trace registered users’ activities through edit logs, histories, and user pages. Some users identify themselves clearly on their user pages; others don’t.
To an outsider, it can certainly seem like the encyclopedia is written by a bunch of secret people. I didn’t learn about the community behind the site until I joined a friend at a gathering with Jimmy Wales in 2004. The community does much of the caring for it. There are committees, a foundation board, a newsletter, etc., etc., just like many other organized group endeavors.
The number of volunteers at between 600 and 1,000 is being kicked around. I first heard it during Jimmy Wales’ Talk of the Nation interview Tuesday. He said it depends on how you count volunteers. That sounded low to me, so I asked Wikipedian James Day, one of the technical team members, about it. James shared some nifty stats indicating that the numbers refer to registered volunteers working on the English edition of Wikipedia. (The encyclopedia is available in many other languages.) Below are some stats he gave me. They reflect activity during the last 30 days for article pages only, not discussion or policy pages.
- 843 registered users edited more than 500 times on the English Wikipedia
- 3041 people edited more than 100 times
- 357 admins edited more than 10 times in the last month [Many admins do much more than just edit articles, which is why the number ten seems oddly low for admins.]
- 465 non-admins edited more than 500 times
- 1034 not admins edited more than 200 times
- 1730 non-admins edited more than 100 times
- 15,832 new articles; 4435 by anonymous users who have no accounts
Maybe those numbers will help shed some light on the number of volunteers and edits.
On Newslib, a discussion list for news librarians, we’ve been talking about how various sources are compiled. It’s important to know how information is constructed and who cares for it because that can influence how reliable the information is and the quality of the source.
December 7th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
I would say Wikipedia has this year passed the 10,000-volunteer mark. My take on it is that the community includes around 15,000 active accounts, twice as many ‘regular’ (active readers, familiar with the interface, acting as typo and vandalism monitors, &c) anonymous contributors, and ten times again as many regular readers – around 500,000.
I’d say 5,000 English community members; anyone who makes 100 edits in a month (3000, in the case of EN:WP) is well over the ‘community membership’ hump and surely already familiar with policies on the site. And there are twice as many active members across the other languages.
December 7th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
SJ, agreed. I was being very conservative with the numbers I provided.
I was playing also with reports of all new articles by anons, or those not linked to, possibly with complete list of all revisions and comments for each article, but not diffs. It’s not unduly difficult to do that sort of thing in MediaWiki.
December 7th, 2005 at 6:56 pm
That Pajamas quote has another interesting aspect:
“whose identities cannot be learned even by Wikipedia’s owners”
Perhaps they missed a key point. Those same anonymous people are Wikipedia’s owners: the copyright holders to the encyclopedia. They are actually complaining about the way the owners like it.