5 facts about Wikipedia that you did not know. The third will blow your ... ah, who am I kidding

The articles published for 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 have earned with such traffic if it sold banner ads? The guys from MonetizePros.com estimated : 210 million dollars a month. Twice as much as Twitter, but four times less than Facebook.


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Want 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 runs the seventh website in the world in attendance, employs only 280 people.
2. Wikipedia is a poor company. Last year, Wikipedia collected donations of $ 75 million (of which 58 million were small online donations from nearly 5 million people). For comparison, Facebook earns so much in one day . As Jimmy Wales said, probably the only well-known Internet entrepreneur who is not a multimillionaire: “Organizing Wikipedia as a non-profit company is either the smartest or the silliest thing in my life.”
3. Wikipedia is proud to be writing almost 300 languages . But only 13 language sections have more than 1,000,000 articles, of which 9 - in European languages ​​(if English and Spanish are among those). Another 44 sections have more than 100,000 articles (including sections on Volapiuk, Esperanto, and Latin). The rest are small or vanishingly small. For example, the “native” for the author Latvian Wikipedia set itself the goal of collecting 100,000 articles by November 18, 2018 - on this day the centenary of the Republic of Latvia will be celebrated.
4. The figures mentioned in the previous section are deception and cheating. A significant (and in some sections - overwhelming) part of the articles are short stubs generated by bots based on geographical or botanical reference books. For example, the Swedish Wikipedia is in second place by the number of articles, but one and a half million out of almost three are “boto-filling” from one single participant, Sverker Johansson .
   Chasing the numbers is a favorite game of the “most important on Wikipedia”, because journalists fall down to the numbers and in general this is an understandable criterion that is convenient for people with managerial skills. But the result of such a strategy is no better than if you pay a programmer for the number of lines of code.
5. According to statistics, the chances of finding an editor among readers are about how to find the molecule of the active substance in the tablet otsylococcinum . With billions of article views per month, in English Wikipedia for fifteen years only one million participants registered, including anonymous. Of these, only 30 thousand make more than five edits per month and 3 thousand - more than 100 edits . In Russian Wikipedia, these numbers correspond to 75000, 3000 and 500. In other words, all the articles of the seemingly immense 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 will try to answer them in the comments.