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

1. How Wikipedia Works:
And how you can be a part of it
Phoebe Ayers
Wikimedia Foundation
UC Davis Libraries
November 6, 2014

2. I use Wikipedia to
live my life.
-- donor comment, 2013 fundraiser

3. Taipei, Wikimania 2007

4. Imagine a world in which every
single human being can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge.
- Wikimedia’s vision statement

6. inter-language
links

7. Wikimedia is global
Wikimedia chapters, 2014 (dark blue = founded)

15. 440M Unique Visitors / Nov 2014
Half from Europe and North America, half from the
rest of the world

16. mobile
Oliver Keyes and Toby Negrin,
May 1 WMF Metrics Meeting
desktop

17. 33M articles in Wikipedia (globally)

18. 23 M files on Commons

20. On the English Wikipedia:
Top 5,000 articles =
~19% of all traffic
From Andrew West: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5000 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-02-
04/Special_report

21. 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

22. The cultivated person’s first duty
is to always be prepared to
rewrite the encyclopedia.
-Umberto Eco

23. Wikimania 2005

25. Bangalore, 2010

26. San Francisco, 2014

27. Wikimania, Haifa 2011

28. 32K active editors/month in English

29. Values
• Free [to use and reuse]
• Volunteer-written
• Supported by readers
• Everyone can participate
• Neutral, encyclopedic, factual
• No top down editorial control:
• Community curated work

33. History of an article

34. compare
Date of edit
username
Edit summary
Their other contributions
Revision of an article – one “edit”

37. Evaluating an article

38. Becoming an editor

39. …saving an edit

40. Why bother?

41. Libraries and Wikipedia

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

44. David Ferrieio, Wikimania 2012

45. Backstage at NARA

52. The future

53. 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)

54. Bridging the gender gap

55. Contributors everywhere

56. And readers, too
Kenya, OLPC school project

57. Keeping knowledge free
SOPA blackout, Jan 18 2012

58. Thank you
psayers@ucdavis.edu