How Wikipedia Works:

And how you can be a part of it

Phoebe AyersWikimedia Foundation

UC Davis LibrariesNovember 6, 2014

I use Wikipedia to live my life.

-- donor comment, 2013 fundraiser

Taipei, Wikimania 2007

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all

knowledge.

- Wikimedia’s vision statement

inter-language links

Wikimedia is global

Wikimedia chapters, 2014 (dark blue = founded)

440M Unique Visitors / Nov 2014

Half from Europe and North America, half from the rest of the world

mobile

Oliver Keyes and Toby Negrin, May 1 WMF Metrics Meeting

desktop

33M articles in Wikipedia (globally)

23 M files on Commons

On the English Wikipedia:

Top 5,000 articles = ~19% of all traffic

From Andrew West: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5000 andhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-02-04/Special_report

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

The cultivated person’s first duty is to always be prepared to rewrite

the encyclopedia. -Umberto Eco

Wikimania 2005

Bangalore, 2010

San Francisco, 2014

Wikimania, Haifa 2011

32K active editors/month in English

• Free [to use and reuse]

• Volunteer-written

• Supported by readers

• Everyone can participate

• Neutral, encyclopedic, factual

• No top down editorial control:

• Community curated work

Values

History of an article

compareDate of edit

username

Their other contributions

Edit summary

Revision of an article – one “edit”

Evaluating an article

Becoming an editor

…saving an edit

Why bother?

Libraries and Wikipedia

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Libraries

David Ferrieio, Wikimania 2012

Backstage at NARA

The future

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)

Bridging the gender gap

Contributors everywhere

And readers, too

Kenya, OLPC school project

Keeping knowledge free

SOPA blackout, Jan 18 2012

Thank you

psayers@ucdavis.edu