Size

Steven Pruitt (Opens in a new window), as of January 2020, has made more edits on the English Wikipedia than any other editor

The English Wikipedia surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020.[13] (Opens in a new window) Its size makes it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled.[6] (Opens in a new window) In August 2020, the total volume of the compressed texts of the English Wikipedia's articles amounted to 18.6 gigabytes (Opens in a new window).[14] (Opens in a new window)

The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Opens in a new window) (Steven Pruitt), who is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million.[5] (Opens in a new window)

English Wikipedia statisticsNumber of user accountsNumber of articlesNumber of filesNumber of administrators41,621,0616,306,372892,9241,098

Wikipedians

The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007,[15] (Opens in a new window) just a little over a year since the millionth Wikipedian (Opens in a new window) registered an account in late February 2006.[16] (Opens in a new window)

Over 1,100,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times.[17] (Opens in a new window) Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and a little over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month.[18] (Opens in a new window) By 24 November 2011, a total of 500 million edits had been performed on the English Wikipedia.[citation needed (Opens in a new window)]

As the largest Wikipedia edition, and because English is such a widely used language, the English Wikipedia draws many users and editors whose native language (Opens in a new window) is not English. Such users may seek information from the English Wikipedia rather than the Wikipedia of their native language because the English Wikipedia tends to contain more information about general subjects. Often bringing in new perspectives, a strong motivation to contribute for them is to increase the coverage of topics outside the English world for an international audience and to enrich existing topics with missing information from non-English countries, thereby helping to reduce systemic bias (Opens in a new window). Successful collaborations have been developed between non-native English speakers who successfully add content to the English Wikipedia and native English speakers who act as copyeditors for them.[citation needed (Opens in a new window)]

English Wikipedia editor numbers

Number of editors on the English Wikipedia over time.

On March 1, 2014, The Economist (Opens in a new window), in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years."[19] (Opens in a new window) The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by The Economist as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). The Economist reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.

Should this attrition have continued unabated at the quoted trend rate of approximately 20,000 editors lost within seven years, by 2021 there would be only 10,000 active editors on English Wikipedia.[19] (Opens in a new window) In contrast, the trend analysis published in The Economist presents Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as successful in retaining their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000.[19] (Opens in a new window) No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively ameliorating substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia.[20] (Opens in a new window)

Arbitration committee

Main article: Arbitration Committee (Opens in a new window)

The English Wikipedia has an arbitration committee (also known as ArbCom) that consists of a panel of editors that imposes binding rulings with regard to disputes between other editors of the online encyclopedia.[21] (Opens in a new window) The committee was created by Jimmy Wales (Opens in a new window) on 4 December 2