User:Sj/NPR

I am being interviewed on Monday (today) by Laura Sydell from NPR. She wanted to talk to someone who is passionate about Wikipedia, but I don't know more.

Things I bear in mind / note / mention: (Feel free to add to this page)

Stats

1000 edits/hr
15M hits/day ~= 200 hits/s
30k users
50/120 langs (get real stats)
support: donations > grants > prizes
WQ1 and 2 stats
wikiprojects: 250?

Kinds of users

• Young users, 7-18 : at home; time after school. Social. Do we really have an active 7 yr old?
• College/grad/law/med/postdoc students, 16-50? : in school; using ref works frequently. see also academics, below
• Academics : 22-100? : working; research and publish frequently
• Professionals : 18-70? : working; sometimes start by working on their fiedls of expertise

Thoughts on WP

[Wikipedia] is an important step towards the global organization of information. Information organization needs to be recognized as a science and an art, something that every member of academia is consciously working towards.

Today it is unconsciously viewed as something that machines or part-time assistants can take care of, with the oversight of a handful of editors or librarians.

Organizing knowledge isn't like sweeping the floors of the ivory tower. It is central to understanding how that tower is even relevant to the rest of the world. Central to the development and absorption of knowledge, central to education.

[It can be] as important as a hundred years of revolutionary breakthroughs (in specific fields).

Reasons to join:
I was at Everything2 which had a month long down time...

...saw a brief 'website of the month' thing on it in Australian PC User magazine

...was reading [article] and it was really wrong; I couldn't leave it like that

started by making a few copyedits; it was a while before I had confidence to start a new article.

Personal draws

Information aesthetic: mav's main page, year-list overviews of history, periodic table

Subprojects: List of E. Topics, Citations, Lang books, translation.

For a given hobby or subfield, there is a little project on the wiki. Some don't have formal rules but a few hundred do.

more stats

Sorry, 2k arts/day, 2k edits/hr, 2k new users/month.
1200+ contribs last year : $100k in donations

   * Wikipedia (1 million articles in 100 languages, 150,000 images, 25,000 contributors, 800,000 visits/day)
   * Wiktionary (70,000 articles in 20 languages, 500 contributors, 800 visits/day)
   * Wikibooks (5,000 modules in 250 books and 15 languages, 300 contributors)
   * Wikiquote (2,500 articles in 6 languages, 100 contributors)
   * Wikisource (4,000 pages in 30 languages, 100 contributors), and
   * Meta (1500 articles in 30 languages, 1,000 contributors)