On 12/15/05, Neil Harris <neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
Sherool wrote:
Neat, one nit pick though, where to they keep
pulling these numbers of
the number of contributors from? 13,000 contributors?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics> says there are
686,624 users. Now granted not ALL of those have contributed (not
constructively anyway), but still...
They may be talking about those who made 5 or more edits in the last
month. of which there were 13174 in September 2005, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm
The volunteer army deserves more credit. Even by
accounts-with-5-edits-a-month standards, it should be 15,000 in
English [and 30,000 in all languages].
I would peg the # of volunteers 25% higher, since there are slow,
steady, excellent contributors, and many active anons. One often
finds anons monitoring and maintaining specific pages; I recently put
a face to this phenomenon in meeting two professionals, one a
businessman and another employed at an international charity, who edit
and keep their eye on at least one article in which they are armchair
experts. (But "of course" anonymously. Bad enough when someone peeks
into your office and sees -- is that a Wikipedia edit page? -- worse
yet if you are logged in and it might be construed as a pasttime.)
++SJ