 | This is aninformation page. It is not anencyclopedic article, nor one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels ofconsensus andvetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Everyone – including you – can make improvements toWikipedia, the free encyclopedia. |
You do. Yes, anyone canbe bold and edit an existing article or create a new one, and volunteers do not need to have any formal training. Thepeople who create and edit articles on Wikipedia come from many countries, with individuals who all bring something different with them, but most importantly a willingness to help in building a free encyclopedia of reliable information. Any contributor to this encyclopedia,unregistered andregistered alike, is called a "Wikipedian", or, more formally, an "editor" of theencyclopedia. Almost all Wikipedians arevolunteers. Other categories of Wikipedians have emerged as well.
900,000 / 900,000 Less than a million editors contribute each year. | |
120,000 / 900,000 About one in eight of them contributed last month. | |
9,000 / 900,000 About 9,000 editors made 30+ edits last month. |
The English Wikipedia currently has49,848,100 users who have registered a username. In the last year, less than a million registered editorsmade any edit, and most of those have onlymade a few edits ever.
Only a minority of users contribute regularly (114,111 have edited at all in the last 30 days; less than 10% of them averaged at leastone edit per day) Only a minority of those contributors participate incommunity discussions.
An unknown but relatively large number ofunregistered Wikipedians also contribute to the site.
The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people.
— Jimmy Wales · Founder of Wikipedia,July 2005 – TEDGlobal conference
 The greatest number, orplurality, of editors (20%) reside in theUnited States, followed byGermany (12%) andRussia (7%). The only country not inEurope orNorth America in the top 10 isIndia (3%). |
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 Wikipedians, 91% of respondents were male. |
13 / 100 13% of editors are 17 or under. | |
14 / 100 14% are in the group 18–21. | |
26 / 100 26% are 22–29. | |
19 / 100 19% are 30–39. | |
28 / 100 28% of editors are aged 40+. | |
59 / 100 59% of the editors are aged 17 to 40. |
Contributions come from diverse demographic and ethnographic segments:
Many people in the Wikipedia community are conscious that the demographics of editors hassystemic bias in the content of the site and efforts are being made toremedy these biases.
The content of any particular article is subject to editorial discretion developed via consensus.Wikipedia is not paper, which means wecan write almost an unlimited amount on any topic. Still, there are limits on what weought to include, and especially how we ought to write it. When an article is incomplete or inaccurate, you canedit the article to be more accurate and/or useful. Someone may place a notice at the top of the article indicating that it needs to becleaned up. It is also possible tocreate a new article to share information that is not yet in Wikipedia.
The way to decide whether a particular statement is accurate is to find independentreliable sources to affirm that statement, such as books, magazine articles, television news stories, trade journals, or other websites. For more guidance on evaluating the accuracy ofWikipedia articles, seeresearching with Wikipedia. It is Wikipedia's policy to add to the encyclopedia only statements that areverifiable and notoriginal research. The Wikipedia style guide encourages editors tocite sources. Detailed citations allow readers of the article to easily verify the content in question.
When a large group of people work to compile information on a given topic, disputes may arise. A useful feature of Wikipedia is the ability to tag an article, or a section of the article, as subject of adispute about a neutral point of view. This feature is especially popular for controversial topics, topics subject to changing current events or other topics where divergent opinions exist. To resolve the dispute, the interested editors will share their points of view on the article'stalk page. They will attempt to reachconsensus so that all valid perspectives can be fairly represented. This allows Wikipedia to be a place not only of information, but of collaboration. Many users of Wikipedia consult thepage history of an article in order to assess the number, and the perspective, of people who contributed to the article. You may also consult the talk page of any article to see what other readers and editors have to say about it.
Wikipedia's best articles are highlighted in thelist of featured articles. These articles were granted "featured" status because they werejudged to be of high quality by other editors and users. (If later edits reduce the quality of a featured article, a user can nominate an article for removal from the list.)