How many people have edited wikipedia

According to the results of a recent study that looked at the million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia's editors have generated 77 percent of the site's content.

Wikipedia wouldn't have been possible without a dedicated leadership. At the time of writing, there are roughly , registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site. So statistically speaking, only about 1, people are creating over three-quarters of the new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.

Of course, these "1 percenters" have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks. In the early days, when there were only a few hundred thousand people collaborating on Wikipedia, Matei said the content production was significantly more equitable. But as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia's growth ever since.

Matei and his colleague Brian Britt, an assistant professor of journalism at South Dakota State University, used a machine learning algorithm to crawl the quarter of a billion publicly available edit logs from Wikipedia's first decade of existence.

The results of this research, published September as a book , suggests that for all of Wikipedia's pretension to being a site produced by a network of freely collaborating peers, "some peers are more equal than others," according to Matei. Matei and Britt argue that rather than being a decentralized, spontaneously evolving organization, Wikipedia is better described as an " adhocracy "—a stable hierarchical power structure which nevertheless allows for a high degree of individual mobility within that hierarchy.

They invested so much of their time and seeded the collaboration process. In this respect, Wikipedia isn't that much different from other for-profit social media companies. And like these companies, its leadership has created its own share of problems. In a publicly available audit of its volunteer editors published in , the Wikimedia Foundation found that the overwhelming majority—91 percent—of its editors were male.

The Foundation set itself a goal of bolstering female representation among editors to 25 percent, but as of —the most recent year this data has been collected and published— 84 percent of editors were male. One obvious one is not being dishonest. Another is avoiding opinion and sticking to verifiable facts. But it is possible to set up a user account with a pseudonymous username to allow you to edit anonymously.

However, using anonymous accounts for blatant misrepresentation and puffery - known as sock puppetry - is often spotted and the offending content challenged or removed by other editors. Blatant self-promotion is frowned upon by the community and viewed as a conflict of interest.

Anyway, as you don't control the page, less flattering information may soon be added by others. But examples of Wikispam, as it's sometimes called, are "speedily deleted" according to the website. You don't need to log in to the site to read or edit articles, but setting up an account and registering allows you to create your own pages, upload content and edit without your internet protocol IP address - the number that identifies a mobile phone or computer on a network - being visible to the public.

The Wiki administrators, who number around 1,, can usually identify the IP address of someone editing articles and this can be tracked to a rough location, enabling them to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour. Offending accounts can be suspended, without individuals necessarily being identified. If the IP address is different - you use a different computer or phone than the one you used before and, if you're being really sneaky, move location to do your editing - there's no reason why you can't set up another anonymous account and carry on as before.

And there are plenty of services allowing internet users to hide their IP addresses anyway, for example, by using an encrypted virtual private network. Someone going to great lengths to hide their IP address is sometimes enough to arouse suspicion among the site's administrators. And patterns of behaviour - from the adoption of similar usernames to a focus on specific topics and types of edit - can reveal a lot about motivations and personality.

Multiple accounts can often be tracked to one individual - we're never as anonymous as we like to believe. But any open and collaborative system will always be open to abuse. Shapps denies Wikipedia claims. Image source, Getty Images. The English-language version of Wikipedia has about 25 million users.