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An overview of how Wikipedia works, with stats updated to October 2014. Library- and librarian-related examples and an overview of recent community projects
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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
