It's been reported for some time now that the number of active
editors on Wikipedia (usually defined as people who have edited at
least 5 times in a given month) peaked in 2007 and has been mostly
stable since then. A graph of the total number of active editors in
every month since Wikipedia's founding is shown below. The graph shows
the aggregate numbers for all language Wikipedias. English Wikipedia
is the largest component of this and is generally more variable. That
said, very similar patterns exist for most larger languages.
Felipe Ortega, who has provided many of these statistics, has warned
against fatalist claims. Although there seems to be a decrease in
the total number of active editors over the last two years, the
situation seems to have somewhat stabilized in most languages. New
editors in Wikipedia are replacing folks at almost the rate that they
are leaving. It is also widely known that the number of readers of
Wikipedia has been increasing during this period. According to the
report cards released by the foundation using comScore data, the
number of unique visitors to Wikipedia each month has increased by 61
million people in the last year -- over 17%.
This discrepancy between rising readership and stable or sinking
editorship should raise major concern. After all, the Wikimedia
Foundation's mission is two part: (1) to empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content and (2) to
disseminate it effectively and globally. Although the Foundation
report cards include measures of raw levels of editorship, a better
metric of engagement and empowerment might be the proportion of
readers who engage in editing.
I could not find reliable data on the number of unique readers reached
each month for more than a few months in the last year. What is
available, however, is wonderful data on page views each month
going back to 2008. Analysis of the data from available report
cards show that, at least during the last year, there is a very
stable ratio of 35 page views per unique visitor, as estimated by
comScore. Using that measure, we can do a back of the envelope
estimation on the proportion of users that are editors for the period
where page view data is available, dating back from February 2008 (
marked with the grey dashed lined above).
The graphs below show the very different results you get when you
consider the change in the number of Wikipedia editors and the change
in the editor-to-reader ratio. Once again, these data are combined
data for all language Wikipedias although graphs look very similar for
most larger languages. The results are striking. Although there has
been a 12% decrease between February 2008 and December 2010 in the
number of active editors, there is a 42% decrease in the proportion
of readers who edit at least five times a month. We can see that
fulfilling the first half of the Wikimedia mission remains a struggle.
Although the graphs above do not say anything directly about the most
active core contributors to Wikipedia, the fact that Wikipedia is
being maintained by a tiny -- and shrinking -- proportion of its
readership does mean that the idea behind Wikipedia is under threat.
Although none are as big as Wikipedia, there are lots of good
encyclopedias out there. The reason Wikipedia is different,
interesting, and important is because -- unlike all those others --
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Wikipedia is
powerful because it allow its users to transcend their role as
consumers of the information they use to understand the
world. Wikipedia allows users to define the reference works that
define their understanding of the their environment and each other.
But 99.98% of the time, readers do not transcend that role. I think
that's a problem. Worse, that the number is growing.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently ran a major successful effort to
attract donations in its annual fundraiser. Jimmy Wales' smiling mug
is apparently enough in the way of motivation to get something like 1%
of its readers to donate money to support the project. I think that's
very good news. If the Wikimedia community can entice even half of
those people to contribute through an increased involvement in the
projects themselves, they might do more than ensure Wikipedia's
continued growth. They would help take a step toward the empowerment
and engagement of those users in sharing their own knowledge, and the
continued fulfillment of a critically important mission.
