Search Wikipedia Search Donate Create account Log in

Wikipedia 318 languages

Article Talk Read View source View history Tools

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the online encyclopedia. For Wikipedia's home page, see
Main Page. For the primary English-language Wikipedia, see English Wikipedia.
For other uses, see Wikipedia (disambiguation).

Wikipedia[c] is a free online Wikipedia

encyclopedia written and
maintained by a community of
volunteers, known as
Wikipedians, through open
collaboration and the wiki
software MediaWiki. Founded
by Jimmy Wales and Larry
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs
Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has from various writing systems
been hosted since 2003 by the
Screenshot [show]
Wikimedia Foundation, an
American nonprofit organization Type of site Online encyclopedia

funded mainly by donations from Available in 343 languages

readers.[2] Wikipedia is the Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.

largest and most-read reference Country of United States

origin
work in history.[3][4]
Owner Wikimedia Foundation (since
Initially available only in English, 2003)

Wikipedia exists in over 340 Created by Jimmy Wales

Larry Sanger[1]
languages and is the world's
URL wikipedia.org
ninth most visited website. The
English Wikipedia, with over Commercial No

7 million articles, remains the Registration Optional[a]

largest of the editions, which Users 121 million (as of September 3,

2025)
together comprise more than 65
Launched January 15, 2001
million articles and attract more
(24 years ago)
than 1.5 billion unique device
Current status Active
visits and 13 million edits per
Content CC Attribution / Share-Alike 4.0[b]
month (about 5 edits per second license
on average) as of April 2024. Written in PHP
[W 1] As of May 2025, over 25% OCLC number 52075003
of Wikipedia's traffic comes from
the United States, while Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each
account for around 5%. [needs update][5]

Wikipedia has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its
extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture. Wikipedia has been censored by
some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site.[6][7]
Wikipedia's volunteer editors have written extensively on a wide variety of topics,
but the encyclopedia has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender
bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.[8][9] While
the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved
over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward.[3][10][11] Articles on
breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about
those events.[12][13]

History
Main article: History of Wikipedia

Nupedia
Main article: Nupedia

Various collaborative online encyclopedias

Wikipedia founders
were attempted before the start of Wikipedia,
but with limited success.[14] Wikipedia began
as a complementary project for Nupedia, a
free online English-language encyclopedia
project whose articles were written by
experts and reviewed under a formal
process.[15] It was founded on March 9,
2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger

portal company. Its main figures were Bomis

CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later
Wikipedia.[1][16] Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open
Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU
Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman.[W 2] Wales is
credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[17][W 3]
while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[W 4] On
January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as
a "feeder" project for Nupedia.[W 5]

Launch and rapid growth

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 (referred to as Wikipedia Day)[18] as
a single English language edition with the domain name www.wikipedia.com,[W 6]
and was announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[17] The name originated
from a blend of the words wiki and encyclopedia.[19][20] Its integral policy of
"neutral point of view" arose within its first year.[21] Otherwise, there were initially
relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia.[17] Bomis originally
intended for it to be a for-profit business.[22]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from

Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web
search engine indexing. Language editions
were created beginning in March 2001, with
a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004.
[W 7][W 8] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted

until the former's servers were taken down

permanently in 2003, and its text was
incorporated into Wikipedia. The English
Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million
articles on September 9, 2007, making it
the largest encyclopedia ever assembled,
surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made
in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408,
which had held the record for almost
600 years.[23]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and The Wikipedia home page on

December 20, 2001[d]
lack of control, users of the Spanish
Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create
Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[W 9] Wales then announced that Wikipedia
would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from
wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[24][W 10]

After an early period of exponential growth,[25] the growth rate of the English
Wikipedia in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have
peaked around early 2007.[26] The edition reached 3 million articles in August
2009. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013
that average was roughly 800.[W 11] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center
attributed this slowing of growth to "increased coordination and overhead costs,
exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits".[25] Others suggested that
the growth flattened naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging
fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—had already been created and built up
extensively.[27][28][29]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid,

Spain found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three
months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in
2008.[30][31] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and
disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[32] Wales
disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's
methodology.[33] Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting
a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June
2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and
sustainable".[34] A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia",
questioned this claim, reporting that since 2007 Wikipedia had lost a third of its
volunteer editors, and suggesting that those remaining had focused increasingly on
minutiae.[35] In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of administrators
was also in decline.[36] In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine,
Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an
internal crisis."[37] The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since
remained steady after a long period of decline.[38][39]

Sister projects
Main article: Wikimedia project

Wikipedia has spawned several sister projects, which are also wikis run by the
Wikimedia Foundation. These other Wikimedia projects include Wiktionary, a
dictionary project launched in December 2002,[W 12] Wikiquote, a collection of
quotations created a week after Wikimedia launched,[40] Wikibooks, a collection of
collaboratively written free textbooks and annotated texts,[W 13] Wikimedia
Commons, a site devoted to free-knowledge multimedia,[W 14] Wikinews, for
collaborative journalism,[W 15] and Wikiversity, a project for the creation of free
learning materials and the provision of online learning activities.[W 16] Another
sister project of Wikipedia, Wikispecies, is a catalog of all species, but is not open
for public editing.[41] In 2012, Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide,[42] and
Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched.[W 17]

Milestones
In January 2007, Wikipedia
first became one of the ten
most popular websites in the
United States, according to
Comscore Networks.[43] With
42.9 million unique visitors, it
was ranked ninth, surpassing
The New York Times (#10)
and Apple (#11).[43] This Cartogram showing number of articles in each
marked a significant increase language as of March 2024. Languages with fewer
than 1,000,000 articles are represented by one
over January 2006, when circle. Languages are grouped by region of
Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with continent and each region of continent is presented
around 18.3 million unique by a separate color.

visitors.[44] In 2014, it
received 8 billion page views every month.[W 18] On February 9, 2014, The New
York Times reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million
unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore".[45] As of
March 2023, it ranked sixth in popularity, according to Similarweb.[46] Loveland and
Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical
encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic
accumulation".[47][48]

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated

protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop
Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its
pages for 24 hours.[49] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout
explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.[50][W 19]

In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia;[51] in

October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the Wikipedia Monument;[52] and, in
July 2015, 106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as
Print Wikipedia.[53] In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed
on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia
engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash.[54]
[55] In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English

Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA.[56]

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated
that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its
page views last year. There was a decline of about 2 billion between December
2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-
views of the English Wikipedia declined by twelve percent, those of German
version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost 9 percent."[57] Varma
added, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in
counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last
year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[57] When contacted on this matter, Clay
Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's
Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said that he suspected much of the
page-view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your
question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."[57]
By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website
globally.[58] As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited
92,300 times in scholarly journals,[59] from which cloud computing was the most
cited page.[60]

On January 18, 2023, Wikipedia debuted a new website redesign, called "Vector
2022".[61][62] It featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the
left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the
language selection tool.[62][W 20] The update initially received backlash, most
notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the
changes.[61][63]

Collaborative editing

Restrictions
Due to Wikipedia's increasing popularity,
some editions, including the English
version, have introduced editing restrictions
for certain cases. For instance, on the
English Wikipedia and some other
Differences between versions of
language editions, only registered users
an article are highlighted.
may create a new article.[W 21] On the
English Wikipedia, among others,
particularly controversial, sensitive, or vandalism-prone pages have been protected
to varying degrees.[64] A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or
"extended confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended
confirmed" editors can modify it.[65] A particularly contentious article may be locked
so that only administrators can make changes.[W 22] A 2021 article in the Columbia
Journalism Review identified Wikipedia's page-protection policies as "perhaps the
most important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas".[66]
Wikipedia has delegated some functions to bots. Such algorithmic governance has
an ease of implementation and scaling, though the automated rejection of edits
may have contributed to a downturn in active Wikipedia editors.[67] Bots must be
approved by the community before their tasks are implemented.[68]

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is
required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the
German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed
certain reviews.[W 23] Following protracted trials and community discussion, the
English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012.[69]
Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or
vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are
published.[70] However, restrictions on editing may reduce the editor engagement
as well as efforts to diversify the editing community.[71]

Articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are placed under extended-

confirmed protection.[72] Editors also can make only one revert per day across the
entire field and can be banned from editing related articles. These restrictions were
introduced in 2008.[73] In January 2025, the Arbitration Committee introduced the
"balanced editing restriction", which requires sanctioned users to devote only a
third of their edits to articles related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict even when no
misconduct rules have been violated.[74][75]

Review of changes
Although changes are not systematically
reviewed, Wikipedia's software provides
tools allowing anyone to review changes
made by others. Each article's History page
links to each revision.[e][76] On most
articles, anyone can view the latest
changes and undo others' revisions by Wikipedia's editing interface

clicking a link on the article's History page.

Registered users may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they
can be notified of changes.[W 24] "New pages patrol" is a process where newly
created articles are checked for obvious problems.[W 25]

In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction
costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and
that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored
"creative construction" over "creative destruction".[77]

Vandalism
Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia

Any change that deliberately compromises Wikipedia's integrity is considered

vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of
obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of
spam.[78] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely
blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate
addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals
can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title
or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code, or use images
disruptively.[W 26]

Obvious vandalism is generally easy to

remove from Wikipedia articles; the median
time to detect and fix it is a few minutes.[79]
[80] However, some vandalism takes much

longer to detect and repair.[81]

In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an

anonymous editor introduced false
American journalist John information into the biography of American
Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of political figure John Seigenthaler in May
the Seigenthaler biography incident
2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect
in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
[81] It remained uncorrected for four months.[81] Seigenthaler, the founding editorial

director of USA Today and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center
at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked
whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales
said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.[82][83] After the
incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research
tool".[81] The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the
verifiability of biographical articles of living people.[84]

Disputes and edit warring

Main article: Disputes on Wikipedia

Wikipedia editors often have disagreements regarding content, which can be

discussed on article Talk pages. Disputes may result in repeated competing
changes to an article, known as "edit warring".[W 27][85] It is widely seen as a
resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added,[86] and
criticized as creating a competitive[87] and conflict-based editing culture associated
with traditional masculine gender roles.[88][89] Research has focused on, for
example, impoliteness of disputes,[90][91] the influence of rival editing camps,[92]
[93] the conversational structure,[94] and the shift in conflicts to a focus on sources.
[95][96]

Taha Yasseri of the University of Oxford examined editing conflicts and their
resolution in a 2013 study.[97][98] Yasseri contended that simple reverts or "undo"
operations were not the most significant measure of counterproductive work
behavior at Wikipedia. He relied instead on "mutually reverting edit pairs", where
one editor reverts the edit of another editor who then, in sequence, returns to revert
the first editor. The results were tabulated for several language versions of
Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia's three largest conflict rates belonged to the
articles George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad.[98] By comparison, for the
German Wikipedia, the three largest conflict rates at the time of the study were for
the articles covering Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.[98] In
2020, researchers identified other measures of editor behaviors, beyond mutual
reverts, to identify editing conflicts across Wikipedia.[96]

Editors also debate the deletion of articles on Wikipedia, with roughly 500,000 such
debates since Wikipedia's inception. Once an article is nominated for deletion, the
dispute is typically determined by initial votes (to keep or delete) and by reference
to topic-specific notability policies.[99]

Policies and content

"Five pillars of Wikipedia" redirects here. For the Wikipedia policy, see
Wikipedia:Five pillars.

Wikipedia is composed of 11 different External videos

namespaces, with its articles being present in
mainspace. Other namespaces have a prefix
before their page title and fulfill various
purposes. For example, the project namespace
uses the Wikipedia prefix and is used for self-
governance related discussions. Most readers
are not aware of these other namespaces.[100]

The fundamental principles of the Wikipedia

community are embodied in the "Five pillars",
while the detailed editorial principles are Jimmy Wales , The Birth of
expressed in numerous policies and guidelines Wikipedia, 2006, TED talks, 20
intended to appropriately shape content.[W 28] minutes

The five pillars are: Katherine Maher , What

Wikipedia Teaches Us About
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia Balancing Truth and Beliefs,
Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of 2022, TED talks, 15 minutes
view
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility
Wikipedia has no firm rules

The rules developed by the community are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia
editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines in accordance with
community consensus.[101] Originally, rules on the non-English editions of
Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They
have since diverged to some extent.[W 23]

Content policies and guidelines

"No original research" redirects here. For the Wikipedia policy, see
Wikipedia:No original research.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia
must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or
dictionary-style.[W 29] A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability",
which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable
sources that are independent of the article's subject.[102] Wikipedia intends to
convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized and therefore
must not present original research.[103] Some subjects such as politicians and
academics have specialized notability requirements.[102] Finally, Wikipedia must
reflect a neutral point of view. This is accomplished through summarizing reliable
sources, using impartial language, and ensuring that multiple points of view are
presented based on their prominence. Information must also be verifiable.[104]
Information without citations may be tagged or removed entirely.[105] This can at
times lead to the removal of information which, though valid, is not properly
sourced.[106] As Wikipedia policies changed over time, and became more complex,
their number has grown. In 2008, there were 44 policy pages and 248 guideline
pages; by 2013, scholars counted 383 policy pages and 449 guideline pages.[67]

Governance
Further information: Wikipedia:Administration

Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over

time.[107][108] An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other
editor, nor by the subject of the article.[W 30] Editors in good standing in the
community can request extra user rights, granting them the technical ability to
perform certain special actions. Some user rights are granted automatically, such
as the autoconfirmed and extended confirmed groups, when thresholds for account
age and edits are met.[65]

Administrators
Main article: Wikipedia administrators

Experienced editors can choose to run for "adminship",[109] which includes the
ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe
vandalism or editorial disputes.[W 31] Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any
special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to
making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary
editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from
making unproductive edits.[W 31]

By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia's

earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had
become more rigorous.[36] In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for
adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted
adminship.[110]

Dispute resolution
Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution process. To
determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate
community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a
more general community discussion known as a "request for comment",[W 27] in
which bots add the discussion to a centralized list of discussions, invite editors to
participate, and remove the discussion from the list after 30 days.[W 32] However,
editors have the discretion to close (and delist) the discussion early or late. If the
result of a discussion is not obvious, a closer—an uninvolved editor usually in good
standing—may render a verdict from the strength of the arguments presented and
then the numbers of arguers on each side.[111] Wikipedians emphasize that the
process is not a vote by referring to statements of opinion in such discussions as
"!vote"s, in which the exclamation mark is the symbol for logical negation and
pronounced "not".[112]

Wikipedia encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which Jemielniak argues is

quite unique in organization studies, though there has been some recent interest in
consensus building in the field.[113] Joseph Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the
approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers.[113]:62 A
difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of
disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings.[113]:83

Arbitration Committee
Main article: Arbitration Committee (Wikipedia)

The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process.
Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views
on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to
directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted.[114]

Statistical analyses suggest that the English Wikipedia committee ignores the
content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted,[115]
functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting
editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive
editors back in to participate.[114] Therefore, the committee does not dictate the
content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it
deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content
is considered biased).[f] Commonly used solutions include cautions and probations
(used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters
(23%), or Wikipedia (16%).[114] Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited
to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.[W 33] When conduct is not
impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing
policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings.[114]

Community
Main article: Wikipedia community

Each article and each user of Wikipedia has

an associated and dedicated "talk" page. CC
These form the primary communication
channel for editors to discuss, coordinate
and debate.[116] Wikipedia's community has
been described as cultlike,[117] although not
always with entirely negative connotations. 8:10
[118] Its preference for cohesiveness, even

if it requires compromise that includes Video of Wikimania 2005 – an

annual conference for users of
disregard of credentials, has been referred Wikipedia and other projects
to as "anti-elitism".[W 34] operated by the Wikimedia
Foundation, was held in Frankfurt
Wikipedia does not require that its editors am Main, Germany, August 4–8.

and contributors provide identification.[119]

As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes
Wikipedia?" became one of the questions
frequently asked there.[120] Jimmy Wales
once argued that only "a community ... a
dedicated group of a few hundred
volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions 1:00
to Wikipedia and that the project is
Wikipedians and British Museum
therefore "much like any traditional
curators collaborate on the article
organization".[121] Since Wikipedia relies Hoxne Hoard in June 2010.
on volunteer labour, editors frequently focus
on topics that interest them.[122]

The English Wikipedia has 7,050,522 articles, 49,625,428 registered editors, and
107,981 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or
more edits in the past 30 days.[W 35] Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia
cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they
are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or
discount their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs:
the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit
to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture
rich with in-jokes and insider references".[123] Editors who do not log in are in some
sense "second-class citizens" on Wikipedia,[123] as "participants are accredited by
members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the
quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation",[124] but the
contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP
addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.[124] New editors
often struggle to understand Wikipedia's complexity. Experienced editors are
encouraged to not "bite" the newcomers in order to create a more welcoming
atmosphere.[125]

Research
A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and
infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as
those contributors who register with the site".[126] Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that
"[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users ... 524
people ... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4%
of all the edits."[121] However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blodget
showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Wikipedia content
(measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled
edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by
"insiders".[121]

In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that "one percent of Wikipedia users are
responsible for about half of the site's edits."[127] This method of evaluating
contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles
he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters)
contributed by users with low edit counts.[128] A 2008 study found that Wikipedians
were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others,[129] although a later
commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher
openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were
small.[130] According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from
Contents hide Appearance hide
the Wikipedia community to new content".[131]

(Top) Text
Diversity
History
Small
Collaborative editing Several studies have shown that most volunteer Wikipedia contributors are male.
Standard
Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only
Policies and content Large
13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female.[132] Because of this, universities
Content policies and
throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia Width
guidelines
contributors.[133] Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown,
Governance Standard
gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in
Wide
Community science or technology.[133] Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, said that the
Language editions reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of Color (beta)
Reception females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to
Automatic
"ugly, intimidating behavior".[134] Data has shown that Africans are
Operation
Light
underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.[135]
Wikimedia Foundation Dark
and affiliate
movements Language editions
Software operations
and support Main article: List of Wikipedias

Automated editing There are currently 343 language editions of

Hardware operations Wikipedia (also called language versions, or

and support simply Wikipedias). As of September 2025, the
Internal research and six largest, in order of article count, are the