This page in a nutshell: Anyone can edit Wikipedia and become a Wikipedian! There are currently 49,867,183 Wikipedia accounts, of which 114,046 have made at least one edit during the last month.
Wikipedia is in the palm of your hand—all you need to do is edit an article.
Wikipedians arevolunteers who contribute toWikipedia byediting its pages, unlikereaders who simply read thearticles. Anyone—including you—can become a Wikipedian byboldlymaking changes when they find something that can be added or improved. To learn more about how to do this, you can check out the basicediting tutorial or the more detailedmanual.
English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[1]
The English Wikipedia currently has49,867,183[2]users who have registered a username, but only about 30% of those have ever edited Wikipedia (about 15 million). Only a minority of users contribute regularly (114,046[3] have edited in the last 30 days), and only a minority of those contributors participate incommunity discussions. In 2024, 775,435 registered editors made at least one edit;[4] about half of these were new accounts making their first (and often only) edit.[5] In a given month, more than 5,000 editors make at least 100 edits each.[6]
An unknown but relatively large number ofunregistered Wikipedians also contribute to the site. As of 2012, most logged-in editors had edited as unregistered Wikipedians before registering their accounts.[7][needs update]
As of February 2015, when about 12,000 editors were eligible to vote in theWikimedia Stewards Elections, their eligibility was based on their English Wikipedia edit count. It applied to those who had an edit count of at least 600 overall and 50 since August 2014. This was about one-quarter of the number of Wikipedians who had 600 edits overall. (See theTalk page for details.)[needs update]
Parts of this Wikipedia page (those related to this section) need to beupdated. Please help update this Wikipedia page to reflect recent events or newly available information. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page.
Gender
84 / 100
The 2013 studyThe Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited measured gender bias in survey completion and estimated that as of 2008, 84% of English Wikipedia editors were male. In the worldwideWikipedia Editor Survey 2011 of all the Wikipedias, 91% of respondents were male.
Most users primarily edit (76%) and read (49%) theEnglish Wikipedia, followed by theGerman Wikipedia at 20% and 12%, and theSpanish Wikipedia at 12% and 6% respectively. More than half (51%) of editors contribute in two or more languages.
Age distribution
13 / 100
13% of editors are under 17.
14 / 100
14% are in the group 18–21.
26 / 100
26% are 22–29.
19 / 100
19% are 30–39.
28 / 100
28% editors are aged 40+.
59 / 100
59% of the editors are aged 18 to 39.
Editing activities
66 / 100
66% of editors said that their primary activity is to edit existing articles.
42 / 100
42% said it was researching articles.
28 / 100
28% said it was creating new articles.
23 / 100
23% said that they do mostly patrolling work.
22 / 100
22% participate primarily in discussions.
17 / 100
17% mainly upload media.
Why contribute?
71 / 100
71% of the editors contribute because they like the idea of volunteering to share knowledge.
69 / 100
69% believe that information should be freely available.
63 / 100
63% pointed out that contributing is fun.
7 / 100
Only 7% edit Wikipedia for professional reasons.
UNU-Merit (United Nations University-Merit) completed the 2010meta:Research:UNU-MERIT Wikipedia survey of Wikipedia users, including both contributors (registered and unregistered) and readers.[10] 176,192 people chose to participate, approximately 58,000 of whom were contributors to Wikipedia. Many of the findings were reported as an aggregate and were not separated by user type. Only the statistics relevant to Wikipedians are presented. In 2011, the WMF (Wikimedia Foundation) presented a questionnaire to logged-in Wikipedia editors (does not include unregistered Wikipedians) to gain a better understanding of the demographics, perceptions and motivations of Wikipedians.[11] Over 5,000 people responded to the survey. Here are the results of both surveys:
UNU-Merit reported the average age of contributors at 26.14 years, but did not provide a greater breakdown of age by user type.[10]
Editors by education completed
Education level completed
WMF (%)
UNU-Merit (%)
Primary
9
11
Secondary
30
34
Undergraduate
35
26
Masters
18
18
PhD
8
4
Other
NR
6
WMF reported 43% of respondents are currently enrolled in school or post-secondary education.[11]
According to the WMF findings, the top three countries where Wikipedia contributors reside are the United States (20%), Germany (12%), and Russia (7%). The primary language of Wikipedia contributors is English (52%) followed by German (18%) with Russian and Spanish coming in third at 10% each. The UNU-Merit study did not breakdown language and country of residence in terms of type of participation with Wikipedia.
According to UNU-Merit, 87 percent of Wikipedians are men and 13 percent are women.[10]
According to the 2011 WMF survey, although the percentage of female editors continues to increase, ninety percent of Wikipedians are male, nine percent female, and one percent transgender/transsexual.[11]
Experienced female editors can be very successful—they are more likely to become administrators than men—but as new editors, their good-faith contributions are more likely to be reverted than good-faith contributions by a man.[12]
More information regarding the gender gap can be found atGender gap.
In an October 2023 representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults,YouGov found that 7% had ever edited Wikipedia, that 20% who had not but had considered doing so, that 55% had never done so and had never considered doing so, and that 17% had never used Wikipedia.[13]
Researchers have begun to identify key personality traits in Wikipedians. According to a study published in 2008, Wikipedia members are more likely than non-members to locate their "real me" online—that is, to feel more comfortable expressing their "real" selves online than offline.[14] This corresponds with more general findings that Internet communities tend to attract users who are introverted offline but more able to open up and feel empowered on the Web.[15][16] A gender difference was found in terms of extroversion: whereas female Wikipedia members were on average more introverted than female non-members, male members were just as extroverted as males in the control group.
In November 2007, the most commonly indicated motives were "fun", "ideology", and "values", whereas the least frequently indicated motives were "career", "social", and "protective" (as in "reducing guilt over personal privilege").[17]
Nomenclature
One could argue that "Wikipedist" would be a more appropriate name, as anencyclopedist is someone who contributes to anencyclopedia.Wikipedian, though, suggests being part of a group, community ordemonym (a resident of a locality). So in this sense, Wikipedians are people who form theWikipedia Community. The term "Wikimedian" is also widely used to include contributors to all the projects supported by theWikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedians who contribute mainly by writing and editing the contents of Wikipedia, without interacting much onTalk oradministrative pages, are sometimes calledexopedians, whereas those who spend significant time on such community interactions are contrasted asmetapedians. A multitude of views and other contribution characteristics are represented well by common Wikipedia-relateduserboxes:Wikipedia:Userboxes/Wikipedia.
^These numbers are dynamically updated with themagic word NUMBERINGROUP:groupname
^Although there are twoco-founders,Jimbo Wales is the only member of this group, as he is the only one of the two who still contributes to Wikipedia.
^abcGlott, Ruediger; Schmidt, Phillipp; Ghosh, Rishab (March 2010)."Wikipedia Survey—Overview of Results"(PDF).Wikipedia Study. UNU-MERIT. Archived from the original on 28 July 2011.
For a listing of current collaborations, tasks, and news, see theCommunity portal. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see theDashboard.
