{"id":261,"date":"2005-12-07T13:16:25","date_gmt":"2005-12-07T17:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/2005\/12\/07\/community-metrics-size\/"},"modified":"2005-12-07T13:16:25","modified_gmt":"2005-12-07T17:16:25","slug":"community-metrics-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2005\/12\/07\/community-metrics-size\/","title":{"rendered":"Community metrics: Size"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a1156'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I have seen many estimates of the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">size<\/span><br \/>\nof Wikipedia&#8217;s community; all of them too low.&nbsp; And what surprises<br \/>\nme most of all is that noone cares much about the lack of real metrics<br \/>\nin their speech, their writing, their journalism, their research.&nbsp;<br \/>\nOkay, that last is going a bit far; many researchers are very careful<br \/>\nabout defining their metrics and terms.&nbsp; But this is what makes<br \/>\nthose which are not <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">stick out<\/span> so severely.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm\">basic statistics<\/a>, care of Erik Zachte&#8217;s scripts, the Wikimedia Foundation&#8217;s server farms, and over 100,000 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesWikipediansContributors.htm\">active contributors<\/a> over the past four years (user statistics often exclude the 15% of edits which come from editors without named accounts).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Wikipedia includes <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesArticlesTotal.htm\">over 2M articles<\/a> and 50M <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesDatabaseLinks.htm\">internal<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesDatabaseWikiLinks.htm\">interlanguage links<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The average article has been edited <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesArticlesEditsPerArticle.htm\">over 15 times<\/a>.&nbsp; \n  <\/li>\n<li>There are at least 1000 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesArticlesTotal.htm\">articles<\/a> in each of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wikipedia.org\">over 80 languages<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Wikipedia averages well over <a href=\"http:\/\/noc.wikimedia.org\/reqstats\/reqstats-monthly.png\">2000 requests a second<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A significant fraction of Wikipedia articles were <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:Most_Referenced_Articles\">auto-generated by scripts<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To the point of the user community:&nbsp; <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm\">more than 15,000<\/a> active English-language editors, at least <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wikistats\/EN\/TablesWikipediansEditsGt100.htm\">1500 of them<\/a> editing &#8216;very actively&#8217; &#8212; 100 times a month. \n  <\/li>\n<li>There are 30,000 active editors, and 4,500 very active editors, in all languages combined.\n  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Just to reiterate the casual power of thousands of zealous volunteers<br \/>\nwith a variety of content-addictions, some of the scripted data above<br \/>\nhas a hand-generated and hand-updated <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics\">wiki cousin<\/a>, with its own original additions.<\/p>\n<p>As for where I personally draw the line at counting community size, I<br \/>\nwould say the English Wikipedia has this year passed the<br \/>\n10,000-volunteer mark, and is currently around 20,000.&nbsp; We would<br \/>\nknow better if we counted not only edits but <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">page-views<\/span><br \/>\nper<br \/>\nuser&#8230; there are those who edit infrequently but keep up with all<br \/>\naspects of the community; and also many who edit occasionally but<br \/>\nhaven&#8217;t taken<br \/>\ntime to learn the community policies or norms; which one might <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">discount<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>I would estimate 60,000 in the &#8216;copyediting&#8217; community (active<br \/>\nreaders, familiar with the interface, acting as typo and vandalism<br \/>\nmonitors; and anonymous contributors), and ten times again as many<br \/>\nregular readers &#8211; around 500,000. &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For all languages combined<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> :<\/span> 40,000 volunteers, perhaps 120,000 in the<br \/>\n&#8216;copyediting&#8217; community (people in other langs are on average less<br \/>\nlikely to understand that they can edit; which I would <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">expect <\/span>to grow more than linearly<br \/>\nwith the size of the community and press coverage in that language),<br \/>\nand some 2M active readers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have seen many estimates of the size of Wikipedia&#8217;s community; all of them too low.&nbsp; And what surprises me most of all is that noone cares much about the lack of real metrics in their speech, their writing, their journalism, their research.&nbsp; Okay, that last is going a bit far; many researchers are very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[213],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metrics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-4d","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}