Who edits Wikipedia anyway?

Since this week one of the tasks on our to-do list was to get bold enough to edit a page in Wikipedia.  It got me thinking, who edits these pages anyway?  I'll admit, the closest I've ever gotten to an edit was years and years ago when I present when an ex-coworker decided to update the page of the place that we worked with information about how they treated their workers poorly.  Incidentally, that information came down quite quickly, so there are clearly people keeping up these sites.  I decided to do a little research, which I am sharing with you here.

Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia which is fairly transparent about their organizational structure.  This page  explains their hierarchical structure.  Here are some of the highlights:  Wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone and new editors are encouraged to be bold and get involved.  Interestingly, they even have a written encouragement for those more established editors to be friendly to newcomers, including a designated page on not "biting the newcomers." This site includes common errors that newcomers commit and pleas to understand the importance of new editors to the site.

This made me wonder what the community of Wikipedia editors looks like. Because clearly, there are regular editors that spend a good portion of their life.  From Wikipedia's own published information there are 25 million named users but only a portion, 118,000 "Wikimedians" have edited in the last 30 days. Who are these editors?  A 2013 article published on these individuals in The Atlantic claimed that 90% of the editors are male.  More recent information has been published examining more recent information and attempts to make the editing board more diverse.  I'll refrain from giving you a little bit of my social commentary on that one and let you know that I also found out that Wikipedia editing has been in continuous decline since 2005. A recent article in the Guardian states that the rise of mobile technology and the difficulties of using the editing language Wikipedia utilizes on a mobile phone.  But I would guess that the dedicated editors plus the handful of newcomers that come on every so often should be enough to maintain the site.  Keep in mind that at least for the English component, a good majority of the topics are already at least slightly presented on the site.  Think about it, when is the last time you looked for something on Wikipedia and there was absolutely nothing written upon it.  So it should be fair to say that the majority of the editing needed to be done on the site are more recent occurrences, which should also be the topics that are most appealing to editors. So despite the decline in editors, I would imagine that Wikipedia will continue to be a highly used resource in our online world.