[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Audited Financial Statements for 2009-10 Fiscal Year Now Available

[Andrew Gray]

On 26 October 2010 23:54, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 9:40 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>..
>> "Wikipedia contains more than 16 million articles contributed by a
>> global volunteer  community of more than 100,000 people." You are
>> using some non standard definitions of community here.
>
> I'd like to see how that figure of 100,000 was arrived at.

I'm not sure of the exact working, but a quick sanity-check:

Per wikistats, the total "active registered editors" hovers around
85,000 for all Wikipedia "editions". This figure represents the sum of
number of active accounts on each project at any given moment; on the
one hand, it overcounts, because it doesn't account for duplicate
activity (someone who is "active" on both fr and de), but on the other
hand, it doesn't account for people who're less active than our
five-edits-per-month threshold.

It also doesn't clearly account for people who're active one month and
not the next - simply averaging the headline figures will treat twelve
people, each active in a different month, as the same as a single
person active in all twelve. Similarly, there is an open question as
to whether or not our count should be entirely in the present tense.
There are plenty of articles contributed by community members who've
not edited in the past year or two - they may not currently be part of
the community of contributors, but they certainly were then, they
certainly wrote that content, and they certainly are among the X
thousand people to have done so! It may be appropriate to factor these
people in as well to the headline figure; this is a bit more
debatable, since "community" implies an instantaneous count, but I
think you can make a decent case either way.

So our first estimate is 85k; polyglot users will drive the figure
down, whilst "less active" users will drive the total up, as will
accounting for past contributors. I don't have any estimates as to the
magnitudes of those effects, but a total of 100k seems well within the
realm of possibility.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk