Wikipedia:Wikipedians
This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, but rather intends to describe some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
This page in a nutshell: Anyone can edit Wikipedia and become a Wikipedian! There are currently 45,203,641 Wikipedia accounts, of which 129,988 have made at least one edit during the last month. |
Human administration | |||
---|---|---|---|
Wikimedia Board of Trustees | |||
Wikipedians | |||
Wikimedia staff | |||
Stewards | |||
Arbitration Committee | |||
Bureaucrats | |||
Administrators |
Wikipedians are volunteers who contribute to Wikipedia by editing its pages, unlike readers who simply read the articles. Anyone—including you—can become a Wikipedian by boldly making changes when they find something that can be added or improved. To learn more about how to do this, you can check out the basic editing tutorial or the more detailed manual.
Wikipedians do a wide variety of tasks, from fixing typos and removing vandalism to resolving disputes and perfecting content, but are united in a desire to make human knowledge available to every person on the planet.
Number of editors
The English Wikipedia currently has 45,203,641[2] users who have registered a username. Only a minority of users contribute regularly (129,988[3] have edited in the last 30 days), and only a minority of those contributors participate in community discussions. An unknown but relatively large number of unregistered Wikipedians also contribute to the site. As of 2012, most logged-in editors had edited as unregistered Wikipedians before registering their accounts.[4]
As of February 2015, when about 12,000 editors were eligible to vote in the Wikimedia Stewards Elections, their eligibility was based on their English Wikipedia edit count. It applied to those who had an edit count of at least 600 overall and 50 since August 2014. This was about one-quarter of the number of Wikipedians who had 600 edits overall. (See the Talk page for details.)
User permissions
Some accounts have special permissions, including:[5]
- 12 account creators
- 910 administrators
- 4,654 autopatrolled
- 312 bots
- 21 bureaucrats
- 50 checkusers
- 573 confirmed users
- 144 edit filter managers
- 123 event coordinators
- 64,977 extended confirmed users
- 394 file movers
- 1 founder[6]
- 2 importers
- 777 IP block exempt users
- 56 mass message senders
- 722 new page reviewers
- 45 oversighters
- 375 page movers
- 7,834 pending changes reviewers
- 3 researchers
- 6,692 rollbackers
- 188 template editors
- 1 copyright violation bot
Some user groups (such as stewards) act globally, and thus they do not get local flags and local rights.
If you have made... | then you rank in the... | or the... | That's more than... |
---|---|---|---|
1 edit | top 50% of editors | top 22,600,000 of all editors | 50% of all editors |
10 edits | top 5% of editors (the autoconfirmed) |
top 2,260,000 of all editors | 95% of all editors |
100 edits | top 1% of editors | top 452,000 of all editors | 99% of all editors |
500 edits | top 0.25% of editors (the extended confirmed) |
top 113,000 of all editors | 99.75% of all editors |
1,000 edits | top 0.1% of editors | top 45,000 of all editors | 99.9% of all editors |
10,000 edits | top 0.025% of editors | top 11,300 of all editors | 99.975% of all editors |
25,000 edits | top 0.01% of editors | top 4,500 of all editors | 99.99% of all editors |
45,000 edits | top 0.005% of editors | top 2,200 of all editors | 99.995% of all editors |
90,000 edits | top 0.002% of editors | top 900 of all editors | 99.998% of all editors |
140,000 edits | top 0.001% of editors | top 450 of all editors | 99.999% of all editors |
200,000 edits | top 0.0005% of editors | top 226 of all editors | 99.9995% of all editors |
350,000 edits | top 0.0002% of editors | top 90 of all editors | 99.9998% of all editors |
500,000 edits | top 0.0001% of editors | top 45 of all editors | 99.9999% of all editors |
Demographics
Parts of this Wikipedia page (those related to section) need to be updated. Please help update this Wikipedia page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. |
84 / 100
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76 / 100
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49 / 100
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13 / 100
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14 / 100
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26 / 100
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19 / 100
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28 / 100
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59 / 100
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66 / 100
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42 / 100
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28 / 100
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23 / 100
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22 / 100
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17 / 100
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71 / 100
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69 / 100
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63 / 100
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7 / 100
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UNU-Merit (United Nations University-Merit) completed the 2010 meta:Research:UNU-MERIT Wikipedia survey of Wikipedia users, including both contributors (registered and unregistered) and readers.[7] 176,192 people chose to participate, approximately 58,000 of whom were contributors to Wikipedia. Many of the findings were reported as an aggregate and were not separated by user type. Only the statistics relevant to Wikipedians are presented. In 2011, the WMF (Wikimedia Foundation) presented a questionnaire to logged-in Wikipedia editors (does not include unregistered Wikipedians) to gain a better understanding of the demographics, perceptions and motivations of Wikipedians.[8] Over 5,000 people responded to the survey. Here are the results of both surveys:
Age group | WMF (%) |
---|---|
12–17 | 13 percent |
18–21 | 14 percent |
22–29 | 26 percent |
30–39 | 19 percent |
40+ | 28 percent |
UNU-Merit reported the average age of contributors at 26.14 years, but did not provide a greater breakdown of age by user type.[7]
Education level completed | WMF (%) | UNU-Merit (%) |
---|---|---|
Primary | 9 | 11 |
Secondary | 30 | 34 |
Undergraduate | 35 | 26 |
Masters | 18 | 18 |
PhD | 8 | 4 |
Other | NR | 6 |
WMF reported 43% of respondents are currently enrolled in school or post-secondary education.[8]
According to the WMF findings, the top three countries where Wikipedia contributors reside are the United States (20%), Germany (12%), and Russia (7%). The primary language of Wikipedia contributors is English (52%) followed by German (18%) with Russian and Spanish coming in third at 10% each. The UNU-Merit study did not breakdown language and country of residence in terms of type of participation with Wikipedia.
According to UNU-Merit, 87 percent of Wikipedians are men and 13 percent are women.[7]
According to the 2011 WMF survey, although the percentage of female editors continues to increase, ninety percent of Wikipedians are male, nine percent female, and one percent transgender/transsexual.[8]
Experienced female editors can be very successful—they are more likely to become administrators than men—but as new editors, their good-faith contributions are more likely to be reverted than good-faith contributions by a man.[9]
More information regarding the gender gap can be found at Gender gap.
Personality
Researchers have begun to identify key personality traits in Wikipedians. According to a study published in 2008, Wikipedia members are more likely than non-members to locate their "real me" online—that is, to feel more comfortable expressing their "real" selves online than off.[10] This corresponds with more general findings that Internet communities tend to attract users who are introverted offline but more able to open up and feel empowered on the Web.[11][12] A gender difference was found in terms of extroversion: whereas female Wikipedia members were on average more introverted than female non-members, male members were just as extroverted as males in the control group.
Motivations for contributing
In November 2007, the most commonly indicated motives were "fun", "ideology", and "values", whereas the least frequently indicated motives were "career", "social", and "protective" (as in "reducing guilt over personal privilege").[13]
Nomenclature
One could argue that "Wikipedist" would be a more appropriate name, as an encyclopedist is someone who contributes to an encyclopedia. Wikipedian, though, suggests being part of a group, community or demonym (a resident of a locality). So in this sense, Wikipedians are people who form the Wikipedia Community. The term "Wikimedian" is also widely used to include contributors to all the projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Contribution styles
Some Wikipedians welcome newcomers; some Wikipedians award those whom they feel deserve awards. Some upload images or help others do so; some work on history articles; some clean up grammar; and still others work on reverting vandalism. Many take on all these tasks; some, of course, take on none. Whatever one decides to do, every Wikipedian is a valuable member of the community.
Wikipedians who contribute mainly by writing and editing the contents of Wikipedia, without interacting much on Talk or administrative pages, are sometimes called exopedians, whereas those who spend significant time on such community interactions are contrasted as metapedians. A multitude of views and other contribution characteristics are represented well by common Wikipedia-related userboxes: Wikipedia:Userboxes/Wikipedia.
See also
- English Wikipedia
- Wikipedia community
- Category:Wikipedia fauna
- Category:Wikipedians
- Wikipedia:Anti-Wikipedian
- Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians
- Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:Essay directory
- Wikipedia:Facebook directory
- Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians
- Wikipedia:Notable people who have edited Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:Statistics
- Wikipedia:User categories
- Wikipedia:Who writes Wikipedia?
References
- ^ "Wikipedia Statistics (English)". stats.wikimedia.org.
- ^ This number is dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBEROFUSERS
- ^ This number is dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS
- ^ Pande, Mani (2012-05-10). "59 percent of logged-in Wikipedians started as anonymous editors". Diff. Retrieved 2022-09-01.
- ^ These numbers are dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBERINGROUP:groupname
- ^ Although there are two co-founders, Jimbo Wales is the only member of this group.
- ^ a b c Glott, Ruediger; Schmidt, Phillipp; Ghosh, Rishab (March 2010). "Wikipedia Survey—Overview of Results" (PDF). Wikipedia Study. UNU-MERIT. Archived from the original on 28 August 2011.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) - ^ a b c d "Wikipedia Editor Study: Results From the Editor Survey, April 2011" (PDF). Wikimedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
- ^ Lam, S. K.; Uduwage, A.; Dong, Z.; Sen, S.; Musicant, D. R.; Terveen, L.; Riedl, J. (October 2011). "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance". WikiSym. ACM. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1145/2038558.2038560. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011.
- ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y.; Lamdan, Naama; Madiel, Rinat; Hayat, Tsahi (November 2008). "Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members". CyberPsychology & Behavior. 11 (6): 679–81. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.0225. PMID 18954273.
- ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y.; Wainapel, G.; Fox, S. (May 2002). "On the Internet no one knows I'm an introvert: extroversion, neuroticism and Internet interaction". CyberPsychology & Behavior. 5 (2): 125–128. doi:10.1089/109493102753770507. PMID 12025878.
- ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y.; McKenna, K.; Tal, S. (September 2008). "E-empowerment: Empowerment by the Internet". Computers in Human Behavior. 24 (5): 1776–1789. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.02.002.
- ^ Nov, Oded (November 2007). "What Motivates Wikipedians?" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 50 (11): 60–64. doi:10.1145/1297797.1297798. S2CID 16517355. Archived (PDF) from the original on 23 April 2012.