Passion is What Drives Wikipedia Editors

An in-house Wikipedia study revealed that editors contribute to the site mainly because of their passion for freely available information. The report also showcased that men, compared to women are still the main contributors to Wikipedia's knowledge-base.

During the month of April, Wikimedia, the foundation that runs and controls Wikipedia, the Internet's largest knowledge-base, surveyed their users on a wide range of topics.

One topic at a time, they are now revealing the results of their inquiry.

Last month, the company showcased how almost 40% of all new contributors are criticized on their first edits. Recently this month, Wikimedia revealed four more result sets from the same study.

As in previous years, male editors are still predominant on the site, compared to women contributors (see photo 2).

Editors aged over 40 and between 22 and 29 contributed most to the site, while editors between 12 and 17 made a smaller impact.

The lack of involvement from highly educated users still remains, editors with PhD studies being the less represented group based on the editor's last completed education level.

Users with under-graduate diplomas contributed the most, followed by people with Secondary studies (High School diploma). Ranked third where users with a Master's degree.

When asked what were their reasons for editing Wikipedia, users had an array of choices to select from.

The four choices that were checked by more than 60% of the respondents where: “I like the idea of volunteering to share knowledge” (71%), “I believe that information should be freely available to everyone” (69%), “I like to contribute to subject matters in which I have expertise” (63%) and “It's fun” (60%).

The less checked answer was “I do it for professional reasons”, only 7% of all the editors.

Even if Wikipedia has been under the gun lately for not being able to filter bad information in user edits, the general opinion from this study is that people still like to contribute to the site, being fun and personally satisfying at the same time.