It may come from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm - which is from 2006 and only for the English Wikipedia. According to that site, there are slightly over 150,000 registered contributors who have made at least ten edits on en.wp. That number jumps to about 300,000 when all languages are included (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm), but again, that is from late 2006.
Stuart Geiger
On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 11:56 AM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Getting any reliable estimates on our community has always been difficult. However, recently, in official Wikimedia Foundation announcements and such (ex. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en?utm_source=2008_jimmy_l...) the number "a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers" appeared. I would very much like to now - what date is it based on?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians gives 8.5 million registered accounts. Of course many of those are duplicates, but then there are many unregistered contributors... still, my own guesstimate would be at at least half a million - if not several millions - of people who had edited Wikipedia (in any language, ove the past ~8 years). This guesstimate is based on analysis of a small sample of editors I know and how many accounts they've created (which for a vast majority is ONE). Sure, there are sockpuppet vandals, but... do we really have 150,000 volunteers, maybe as much legitimate socks/bots, and over 8 millions vandal sockpuppet accounts???
-- Piotr Konieczny
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