How Wikipedia Works:
And how you can be a part of it
Phoebe AyersWikimedia Foundation
UC Davis LibrariesNovember 6, 2014
I use Wikipedia to live my life.
-- donor comment, 2013 fundraiser
Taipei, Wikimania 2007
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge.
- Wikimedia’s vision statement
inter-language links
Wikimedia is global
Wikimedia chapters, 2014 (dark blue = founded)
440M Unique Visitors / Nov 2014
Half from Europe and North America, half from the rest of the world
mobile
Oliver Keyes and Toby Negrin, May 1 WMF Metrics Meeting
desktop
33M articles in Wikipedia (globally)
23 M files on Commons
On the English Wikipedia:
Top 5,000 articles = ~19% of all traffic
From Andrew West: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5000 andhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-02-04/Special_report
What is Wikimedia?12 projects
280 languages
33 million Wikipedia articles
23 million media files
80,000 active editors
100s of local meetup groups
41 local/national level chapters
200 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco
1,130,000 individual financial donors (in 2011-12)
450,000,000 readers
The cultivated person’s first duty is to always be prepared to rewrite
the encyclopedia. -Umberto Eco
Wikimania 2005
Bangalore, 2010
San Francisco, 2014
Wikimania, Haifa 2011
32K active editors/month in English
• Free [to use and reuse]
• Volunteer-written
• Supported by readers
• Everyone can participate
• Neutral, encyclopedic, factual
• No top down editorial control:
• Community curated work
Values
History of an article
compareDate of edit
username
Their other contributions
Edit summary
Revision of an article – one “edit”
Evaluating an article
Becoming an editor
…saving an edit
Why bother?
Libraries and Wikipedia
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Libraries
David Ferrieio, Wikimania 2012
Backstage at NARA
The future
Number of active editors in…
• Spanish Wikipedia: 4,086 • Chinese Wikipedia: 2,188• Hindi Wikipedia: 44• Swahili Wikipedia: 9• Javanese Wikipedia: 7(Active editors/month in March 2014, from stats.wikimedia.org)
Bridging the gender gap
Contributors everywhere
And readers, too
Kenya, OLPC school project
Keeping knowledge free
SOPA blackout, Jan 18 2012
Thank you
Top Related