Tech 4D

Call me a data geek, but I can’t help myself. I’ve updated my Wikipedia contributor map based on my recent discoveries.

The problem with my earlier post was that I discounted the contributions of people who don’t make a large number of individual edits but add a lot of content. Aaron Swartz (see link above) suggests that there are different types of contributors. First, there is a small group of contributors who make a lot of edits but don’t add a lot of words. For example, they might revert vandalism, fix grammar, reorganize or categorize. Second, there is a larger group of contributors who don’t make a lot of edits overall, but add a lot of words each time they edit. Aaron believes that this group creates the bulk of Wikipedia content.

Of course both types are critical to the success of Wikipedia and the data below indicates to me that it is more of a continuum than a statistical grouping of contributor types.

Another problem with the original post is the total number of worldwide visitors per month (according to comScore, May 07) is actually 217 million. I was using the number of US visitors, which is 48 million.

So here’s the update:

Here are some interesting factoids culled from Wikipedia contributor statistics.

Compare the population of world countries to the Wikipedia contributors. In the hierarchy of users the vast majority of visitors to Wikipedia, 217 million of them, are readers; for the most part they don’t edit articles. Next are the Regular Contributors who have contributed more than 10 times ever. There are about 340,000 if those. Next are the 105,000 Active Editors who contribute between 5 and 100 times per month. Finally, there are the 10,000 Very Active Editors who contribute more than 100 times per month.

So if Wikipedia readers are like China, then the contributors are like Macedonia, Montenegro and Grenada. To extend this analogy to absurd extremes, Macedonia, Montenegro and Grenada do all of the work, have the highest GDP and provide humanitarian aid to China!

Some background math:

The most recent total contributor data on the Wikipedia stats page is from Oct 2006. I applied a 41% growth rate to all numbers to arrive at estimates for May 2007, based on growth in overall traffic as reported by comScore. The ratio of users to contributors is:

1. Regular Contributors; 217M/338k = 642:1
2. Active Editors; 217M/105k = 2055:1
3. Very Active Editors 217M/14k = 15,585:1

Here’s the spreasheet I used to calculate this data. The inspiration to make this map came from the Strangemaps blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 7:52 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.