In 2022, for English Wikipedia, Americans accounted for about 40% of active editors, followed by English and Indian editors accounting for about 10% of each, and Canadian and Australian at about 5%. When it was founded, the committee consisted of 12 arbitrators divided into three groups of four members each. It was created by Jimmy Wales on 4 December 2003 as an extension of the decision-making power he had formerly held as owner of the site. The English Wikipedia has the 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. 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. 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. 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. On March 1, 2014, The Economist, in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years." 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). Įdits to English Wikipedia by country as of January 2022 Over 30,000 editors perform more than 5 edits per month, and over 3,000 perform more than 100 edits per month. Over 1,100,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. The English Wikipedia reached 4,000,000 registered user accounts on 1 April 2007, over a year since the millionth Wikipedian registered an account in February 2006. The English Wikipedia currently has 43,444,975 registered accounts of which 1,049 are administrators. Currently, there are 6,488,569 articles created with 892,685 files. The edition's one-billionth edit was made on 13 January 2021 by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (Steven Pruitt) who as of that date is the user with the highest number of edits on the English Wikipedia, at over four million.
In August 2020, the total volume of the compressed texts of its articles amounted to 18.6 gigabytes. It surpassed six million articles on 23 January 2020. These ideas include "featured articles", the neutral-point-of-view policy, navigation templates, the sorting of short "stub" articles into sub-categories, dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation and arbitration, and weekly collaborations.
The English Wikipedia has pioneered some ideas as conventions, policies or features which were later adopted by Wikipedia editions in some of the other languages.
Screenshot of Wikipedia's article on Earth, 30 March 2021