An overview of how Wikipedia works, with stats updated to October 2014. Library- and librarian-related examples and an overview of recent community projects
20. On the English Wikipedia:
Top 5,000 articles =
~19% of all traffic
From Andrew West: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5000 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-02-
04/Special_report
21. 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
22. The cultivated person’s first duty
is to always be prepared to
rewrite the encyclopedia.
-Umberto Eco
29. Values
• Free [to use and reuse]
• Volunteer-written
• Supported by readers
• Everyone can participate
• Neutral, encyclopedic, factual
• No top down editorial control:
• Community curated work
53. 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)