5 Wikipedia Facts You Did Not Know The third will blow your ... ah, whom I am deceiving

Articles published on the recent 15th anniversary of Wikipedia were similar to all other notes about the most important encyclopedia: 2.5 billion visitors per month, almost 40 million articles, almost 300 languages, blah, blah.

Do you know how much Wikipedia could earn with such traffic if it sold banner ads? The guys at MonetizePros.com have estimated : $ 210 million per month. Twice as big as Twitter, but four times as small as Facebook.



Want some more non-trivial facts? Welcome to the dark side under cat.

1. Wikipedia is a small company. The Wikimedia Foundation, which develops the engine and manages the seventh most visited website in the world, employs only 280 people.
2. Wikipedia is a poor company. Last year, Wikipedia raised $ 75 million in donations (of which 58 million were small online donations from nearly 5 million people). For comparison, Facebook makes so much in one day . As Jimmy Wales said, he is probably the only well-known Internet entrepreneur who is not a multi-millionaire: “Organizing Wikipedia as a non-profit company is either the smartest or the most stupid thing in my life.”
3. Wikipedia is proud to write in almost 300 languages . But only 13 language sections have more than 1,000,000 articles, of which 9 are in European languages ​​(if English and Spanish can be classified as such). In another 44 sections - more than 100,000 articles (including sections in volapyuk, Esperanto and Latin). The rest are small or vanishingly small. For example, the “native” Latvian Wikipedia for the author set himself the goal of typing 100,000 articles by November 18, 2018 - the centenary of the Republic of Latvia will be celebrated on this day.
4. The numbers mentioned in the previous section are deceit and swindle. A significant (and in some sections - overwhelming) part of the articles is short stubs generated by bots based on geographical or botanical reference books. For example, Swedish Wikipedia is in second place by the number of articles, but one and a half million out of almost three are “boto-fill” from one single participant, Sverker Johansson .
   The pursuit of numbers is the favorite game of the “main ones on Wikipedia”, because journalists are greedy for numbers and in general this is an understandable criterion that is convenient to measure for people with a managerial streak. But the result of such a strategy is no better than paying a programmer for the number of lines of code.
5. According to statistics, the chances of finding an editor among the readers are about how to find the molecule of the active substance in the tablet of the oscillococcinum . With billions of article views per month, only one million members, including anonymous ones, have registered on Wikipedia in fifteen years. Of these, only 30 thousand make more than five edits per month and 3 thousand make more than 100 edits . In Russian Wikipedia, these numbers correspond to 75,000, 3,000 and 500. In other words, all the articles of the seemingly vast Wikipedia are actually written by a relatively narrow group of people, comparable to the number of Google employees .
   

Does this mean that Wikipedia is bad? Of course not. In my opinion, Wikipedia is one of the most daring, strange and unpredictable projects of the 21st century. If you have questions about how it works, I’ll try to answer them in the comments.