On 12/15/05, Neil Harris neil@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