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Edit distribution for the 4,000 most active Wikipedians, showing a steady increase with a dramatic final spike from a very small number of editors with extremely high edit counts -
The 4,000 most active Wikipedians when stacked up against each other
Editcountitis
Report on Editcountitis. 27% of all edits have been done by just 4,000 editors
An update from the department of editcountitis.
In the last three years the number of edits needed to get onto List of 4,000 Wikipedians who have done the most edits rose 5,000 edits to 11,426, meaning a very small number of extremely active users continue to contribute large numbers of edits. Since the start of last year the number of editors breaking the 100,000 barrier has jumped by more than half, from 68 to 109, whilst the number of editors who have contributed over 200,000 edits has doubled from ten to twenty. This prompted a proposal to broaden the list from the 4,000 editors with the highest edit count to 5,000. So as of the 9th March 2011 all editors with 9,168 edits or more are on the latest list (though some have opted out of being named).
Across all Wikimedia projects the threshold is much higher on the list of the thousand Wikimedians with most edits everyone has over 55,000 edits. If it could combine edits by the same editor across multiple projects the minimum would doubtless be even higher.
Kevin Rutherford (user:Ktr101) has created these charts to compare the number of edits by the most "prolific" editors on the English language Wikipedia to the rest of the community:
I originally created the graphs after a few on and off ideas over the past few months of wondering how many edits the top four thousand of us hold. At first I thought that it would be a fairly small percentage, something like one out of every eight edits. After I compiled the edits, I was shocked to realize that the top 4,000 editors hold over one quarter of the edits on this site. Divided up amongst the top four thousand, each user on the list makes just over 30,275 edits. This might not seem to much at first, but to those of us who make manual edits, those are years of our lives that are being shown on that graph. I also created the edit distribution graph as a way to see what the last end of a distribution of Wikipedian edits would be and it was exactly as I thought it would be. As expected, it climbs steadily and then jumps up at the end, as our most active editors are counted in. If you think of the fact that there are around 14.1 million editors on the site, that chart is probably just a tiny percentage of the overall percent of Wikipedians who edit.
It is quite a fascinating idea to think that the bunch of us who also are in this group also come from a diverse background in our lives. The average Wikipedian is a male post-graduate student who edits in his spare time. The range of active community is quite unlimited in age but when you think about the fact that it is more likely that these average editors are also giving a lot of time to us while simultaneously earning a degree, it makes one step back and wonder what they can do to help the site some more.
Comparing 4,000 most active editors by thousands (data as at 2nd March 2011)
N.B. Wikipedians who do not want to be on the list of most active editors can have themselves removed in one of two entirely painless ways: by fessing up to actually being a bot and applying for a bot flag at wp:bot requests, or more conventionally by adding themselves to the opt out list.
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