 | This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Everyone – including you – can make improvements to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. |
You do. Yes, anyone can be bold and edit an existing article or create a new one, and volunteers do not need to have any formal training. The people who create and edit articles on Wikipedia come from many countries, with individuals who all bring something different with them, but most importantly a willingness to help in building a free encyclopedia of reliable information. Any contributor to this encyclopedia, unregistered and registered alike, is called a "Wikipedian", or, more formally, an "editor" of the encyclopedia. Almost all Wikipedians are volunteers. Other categories of Wikipedians have emerged as well.
Who contributes to Wikipedia?
Activity
900,000 / 900,000 Less than a million editors contribute each year.
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120,000 / 900,000 About one in eight of them contributed last month.
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9,000 / 900,000 About 9,000 editors made 30+ edits last month.
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The English Wikipedia currently has 48,279,744 users who have registered a username. In the last year, less than a million registered editors made any edit, and most of those have only made a few edits ever.
Only a minority of users contribute regularly (121,641 have edited at all in the last 30 days; less than 10% of them averaged at least one edit per day) Only a minority of those contributors participate in community discussions.
An unknown but relatively large number of unregistered Wikipedians also contribute to the site.
Demographics
The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people.
— Jimmy Wales · Founder of Wikipedia, July 2005 – TEDGlobal conference
 The greatest number, or plurality, of editors (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%). |
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 Wikipedians, 91% of respondents were male.
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13 / 100 13% of editors are 17 or under.
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14 / 100 14% are in the group 18–21.
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26 / 100 26% are 22–29.
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19 / 100 19% are 30–39.
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28 / 100 28% of editors are aged 40+.
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59 / 100 59% of the editors are aged 17 to 40.
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Contributions come from diverse demographic and ethnographic segments:
- Mid-20s males and retired males are the largest demographics. See Gender database reports.
- 10–20% women of various ages, significant underrepresentation acknowledged by Gender bias on Wikipedia and Gender gap
- Students (e.g., in the context of a course)
- Enthusiasts (e.g., people with interest in a particular subject, like butterflies)
- Insiders (e.g., people who work for an organization, such as the Sierra Club)
- Dabblers (e.g., people who see some problem with an article and want to help)
- Scholars (e.g., researchers who want to use Wikipedia as an additional dissemination platform)
- Archivists (e.g., people who work or volunteer at a museum, archive, or library wanting to contribute artifacts, like 18th-century paintings)
- Marketers (e.g., individuals, staff, members, or a PR firm seeking to promote a product, service, or brand)
- Evil-doers (e.g., spammers, vandals)
Many people in the Wikipedia community are conscious that the demographics of editors has systemic bias in the content of the site and efforts are being made to remedy these biases.
How do editors contribute to Wikipedia?
The content of any particular article is subject to editorial discretion developed via consensus. Wikipedia is not paper, which means we can write almost an unlimited amount on any topic. Still, there are limits on what we ought to include, and especially how we ought to write it. When an article is incomplete or inaccurate, you can edit the article to be more accurate and/or useful. Someone may place a notice at the top of the article indicating that it needs to be cleaned up. It is also possible to create a new article to share information that is not yet in Wikipedia.
The way to decide whether a particular statement is accurate is to find independent reliable sources to affirm that statement, such as books, magazine articles, television news stories, trade journals, or other websites. For more guidance on evaluating the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, see researching with Wikipedia. It is Wikipedia's policy to add to the encyclopedia only statements that are verifiable and not original research. The Wikipedia style guide encourages editors to cite sources. Detailed citations allow readers of the article to easily verify the content in question.
When a large group of people work to compile information on a given topic, disputes may arise. A useful feature of Wikipedia is the ability to tag an article, or a section of the article, as subject of a dispute about a neutral point of view. This feature is especially popular for controversial topics, topics subject to changing current events or other topics where divergent opinions exist. To resolve the dispute, the interested editors will share their points of view on the article's talk page. They will attempt to reach consensus so that all valid perspectives can be fairly represented. This allows Wikipedia to be a place not only of information, but of collaboration. Many users of Wikipedia consult the page history of an article in order to assess the number, and the perspective, of people who contributed to the article. You may also consult the talk page of any article to see what other readers and editors have to say about it.
Wikipedia's best articles are highlighted in the list of featured articles. These articles were granted "featured" status because they were judged to be of high quality by other editors and users. (If later edits reduce the quality of a featured article, a user can nominate an article for removal from the list.)
See also
- Who Wrote That? – browser extension permitting Wikipedia readers on several projects to learn who added specific text to an entry.
- For a statistical view of the most active contributors see List of Wikipedians by number of edits and List of Wikipedians by article count
- Administration – discusses how Wikipedia requires a certain amount of administration in order to further the project's goals.
- Core content policies – a brief summary and background on Wikipedia's core content policies.
- Editor integrity – discusses how editors have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of Wikipedia and respect intellectual property rights of the sources they draw upon when they create and improve encyclopedia pages.
- Five pillars – describes the fundamental principles of Wikipedia summarized in five "pillars".
- Purpose – describes Wikipedia's motive for being by its founders.
- The essence of Wikipedia – describes how Wikipedia is the harnessing of the collective intelligence and collaborative efforts of editors who hold opposing points of view, in an attempt to preserve all serious contributions which are reliably sourced.
- Wikipedia is a volunteer service – discusses how editors on Wikipedia are mainly volunteers. Editors can contribute as much as they want, and however long as they desire.