Wikipedia:Research recruitment population

This page gives estimates of the numbers of Wikipedians who are available to be recruited by researchers for surveys, interviews, and experiments. The intent of this page is to inform the researcher of their prospective research participant pool so that they can design research which matches the ability of the population to respond to it.

About these numbers

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. This page describes the community of contributors to English Wikipedia. There are other numbers for the Wikipedias of every other language. Also, Wikipedia is only a text encyclopedia, and other Wikimedia projects manage other aspects of the Wikimedia network. For example, Wikimedia Commons is the non-text media repository which manages all the images, video, and audio for all Wikipedia projects in every language, and it has its own community.

This page gives numbers only for English Wikipedia. English Wikipedia is by far the most popular project in the Wikimedia network. Information about all the language Wikipedias is available at meta:List of Wikipedias.

Wikipedia's general population

English Wikipedia has 47,431,869 registered accounts since its founding in 2001. Of those, only 121,176 have performed an action on Wikipedia in the past 30 days.

• Number of admins: 859
• Number of active registered users: 121,176 (Registered users who have performed an action in the last 30 days; the number of unregistered active users is not compiled)

Highly active users

Administrators are Wikipedia users who have gone through a peer review process and been granted userrights for trusted users. English Wikipedia has 859, and this number can be used as an estimate for the number of highly active Wikipedians who are on hand to help other users with functionary processes in developing Wikipedia.

Other metric for highly active users is a count of the people who watch WikiProjects. A WikiProject is a community of editors who manage a specific field of information in Wikipedia, like military history, medicine, or sports. Counts of watchers are listed at

• Wikipedia:Database reports/WikiProject watchers

In June 2014, the WikiProject with the most active watchers is WikiProject Military History with 544 people watching, so this number is the upper limit for identifying highly active participants of any subject matter community on Wikipedia.

Underrepresented groups

If a typical Wikipedian is someone with the most common characteristics among the entire community, then according to the 2011 editor survey a typical Wikipedian is male, "has a college degree, is 30-years-old, is computer savvy but not necessarily a programmer, doesn't actually spend much time playing games, and lives in the US or Europe". Any person who contributors to Wikipedia and does not fit that profile stands out to researchers as an oddity and is often targeted for research recruitment.

Population characteristics which many researchers seek to recruit for research include the following:

• LGBT populations
• Women
• People of color

If there are 121,176 active users on Wikipedia, then at any given time, only 10% of that amount are likely to be members of these underrepresented groups.

The Wikimedia community has difficulty attracting diversity in its community. It is not helpful that when minority populations come to Wikipedia people solicit them away from community engagement and into research participation with researchers who do not actually wish to be part of the Wikimedia community. Any researcher designing surveys or interviews should be conscious that the Wikimedia community's priority is in making a friendly space in which people can engage Wikipedia without being targeted excessively for their demographic profile. Do not seek to recruit underrepresented populations without a lot of preparation and partnership with a liaison from that community.

Vulnerable populations

• Children
• Persons with disabilities or different abilities