On 26 October 2010 23:54, John Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 9:40 AM, geni <geni...@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.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l