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Wikipedia is in the palm of your hand—all you need to do is edit an article.

Wikipediaers or editors are the volunteers and paid editors who write and edit Wikipedia's articles, unlike readers who simply read them. Anyone—including you—can become a Wikipediaer by boldly making changes when they find something that can be improved. To learn more about how to do this, you can check out the basic editing tutorial or the more detailed manual.

Wikipediaers 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

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Human administration
Wikimedia Board of Trustees
Wikipedians
Wikimedia staff
Stewards
Arbitration Committee
Bureaucrats
Administrators
English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[1]
Gender
84 / 100
The 2013 study The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited measured gender bias in survey completion and estimated that as of 2008, 84% of English Wikipedia editors were male. In the worldwide Wikipedia Editor Survey 2011 of all the Wikipedias, 91% of respondents were male.
Nationality
The greatest number, or plurality, of editors as of 2011: 20% reside in the United States, followed by Germany (12%) and Russia (7%). The only country not in Europe or North America in the top 10 is India (3%).
Language
76 / 100
49 / 100
Most users primarily edit (76%) and read (49%) the English Wikipedia, followed by the German Wikipedia at 20% and 12%, and the Spanish Wikipedia at 12% and 6% respectively. More than half (51%) of editors contribute in two or more languages.
Age distribution
13 / 100
13% of editors are under 17.
14 / 100
14% are in the group 18–21.
26 / 100
26% are 22–29.
19 / 100
19% are 30–39.
28 / 100
28% editors are aged 40+.
59 / 100
59% of the editors are aged 17 to 40.
Editing activities
66 / 100
66% of editors said that their primary activity is to edit existing articles.
42 / 100
42% said it was researching articles.
28 / 100
28% said it was creating new articles.
23 / 100
23% said that they do mostly patrolling work.
22 / 100
22% participate primarily in discussions.
17 / 100
17% mainly upload media.
Why contribute?
71 / 100
71% of the editors contribute because they like the idea of volunteering to share knowledge.
69 / 100
69% believe that information should be freely available.
63 / 100
63% pointed out that contributing is fun.
7 / 100
Only 7% edit Wikipedia for professional reasons.

The English Wikipedia currently has 48,244,562[2] users who have registered a username. Only a minority of users contribute regularly (120,786[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 February 2015, about 12,000 editors were eligible to vote in the Wikimedia Stewards Elections on the basis of their edits on the English Wikipedia, based on having an edit count of at least 600 overall and 50 since August 2014. This is about one quarter of the number who had 600 edits overall. (See the Talk page for details.)

User permissions

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See also: Wikipedia human administrative structure

Some accounts have special permissions, including:[4]

Some user groups (such as stewards) act globally and thus they do not get local flags and local rights.

Notes

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  1. ^ Although there are two co-founders, Jimbo Wales is the only member of this group.

Demographics

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Based on a survey of over 58,000 self-selected Wikipediaers by a group at UNU-Merit published in March 2010, contributors can be split into four approximately equal age-groups: those under 18, those between 18 and 22, those from 22 to 30 and the remainder between 30 and 85.[5]

However the following year a survey by the WMF revealed very different figures:

12–17 13%
18–21 14%
22–29 26%
30–39 19%
40+ 28%

According to the UNU 2010 survey 23% of Wikipediaers have completed degree-level education, 26% are undergraduates and 45% have secondary education or less.[5] The 2011 WMF survey showed 61% graduates, 35% who have achieved undergraduate's degrees, 18% who had achieved a master's degree and another 8% with doctorates.[6]

According to UNU, 87% of Wikipediaers are men and 13% are women. The survey included users of 22 language editions in 231 countries.[5]

According to the 2011 WMF survey, 90% of Wikipediaers are men, 9% are female, and 1% are transgender/transsexual.[6]

Various information about individual Wikipediaers is available on the user pages of Wikipediaers who choose to create them.

Information on the gender gap can be found at meta:Gender gap. The significant and stable[dubious – discuss] under-representation of women results in persistently unbalanced coverage (e.g. articles related to football are much more developed than articles related to motherhood[dubious – discuss]) in Wikipedia.[citation needed] The gender gap may be driven significantly by Wikipedia's conflict-oriented culture. 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.[7]

Personality

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Researchers have begun to identify key personality traits in Wikipediaers. 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.[8] 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.[9][10] 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

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Main article: Motivations of Wikipedia contributors

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").[11]

Nomenclature

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It has been suggested[by whom?] that Wikipedist would be a more appropriate name, as an encyclopedist is someone who contributes to an encyclopedia. Wikipediaer, though, suggests being part of a group, community or demonym (a resident of a locality). So in this sense, Wikipediaers 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

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See also: Wikipediholic and Conflicting philosophies

Some Wikipediaers welcome newcomers; some Wikipediaers 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 of these tasks; some, of course, take on none. Whatever one decides to do, every Wikipediaer is a valuable member of the community.

Wikipediaers 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.

Wikipediaer Project

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In April 27, 2007 an effort of veteran Wikipediaers joined together brought to the establishment of Wikipediaer (with the dot org address). The project intended to serve as a platform for Wikipediaers to expand Wikipedia as an outside body of volunteers and paid editors. The official separation was made in order to assure transparency and proper conduct while not conflicting with Wikipedia's not-for-profit status.

Two years later the project, facing overwhelming demand, closed its doors to companies and individuals seeking help in establishing articles about their entities/personas. The official reason for this was cited as an unreasonable demand from sources who did not meet WP:NOTE.

Since January 1, 2009 the Wikipediaer Project focuses on expanding Wikipedia and contacting potential sources for articles, such as researchers, think-tanks and academies. The project also assists outside clients in establishing relevant articles in Wikipedia, as long as Wiki requirements are met. The Wikipediaer Project cannot currently be contacted; Wikipediaers contact outside sources based on data collected from volunteers and paid editors. Individuals/companies seeking to assist Wikipedia to expand, should in turn see the help page. To contribute monetarily to Wikipedia, please see the various donation options.

See also

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Meta-Wiki
Categorisation
Other

References

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  1. ^ "Wikipedia Statistics (English)". stats.wikimedia.org.
  2. ^ This number is dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBEROFUSERS
  3. ^ This number is dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS
  4. ^ These numbers are dynamically updated with the magic word NUMBERINGROUP:groupname
  5. ^ a b c Glott, Ruediger; Schmidt, Phillipp; Ghosh, Rishab. "Wikipedia Survey - Overview of Results" (PDF). Wikipedia Study. UNU-MERIT. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 August 2011. Retrieved 8 December 2015. {{cite web}}: |archive-date= / |archive-url= timestamp mismatch; 28 July 2011 suggested (help); Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ a b Pande, Mani. "Wikipedia editors do it for fun: First results of our 2011 editor survey". Wikimedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  7. ^ Lam, S. K.; Uduwage, A.; Dong, Z.; Sen, S.; Musicant, D. R.; Terveen, L.; Riedl, J. (2011). "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance". WikiSym. {{cite conference}}: Unknown parameter |booktitle= ignored (|book-title= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y. et al. "Personality Characteristics of Wikipedia Members", CyberPsychology & Behavior, Vol. 11, No. 6 (2008).
  9. ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y., Wainapel G., Fox S. “On the Internet no one knows I’m an introvert: extroversion, neuroticism and Internet interaction.” CyberPsychology & Behavior (2002).
  10. ^ Amichai-Hamburger, Y., McKenna, K., Tal, S. “E-empowerment: Empowerment by the Internet.” Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 24 (2008).
  11. ^ Nov, Oded (2007). "What Motivates Wikipedians?". Communications of the ACM. 50 (11): 60–64. doi:10.1145/1297797.1297798. Retrieved 11 August 2011.
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikipedians.
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