Hacker News Reader

Comment by cooper12 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, I'm already in the first paragraph and I had to bail out. How on earth did they arrive at a figure of "30 million editors"? The number of active English Wikipedia editors is more in the ballpark of 30K according to http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors. The Daily Mail is only confirming why they were discouraged from being used as a source. Some really basic fact checking should have raised suspicion at such a ridiculous number.

View on HN

This comes from wikipedia page about wikipedians:

  Number of editors:

  The English Wikipedia currently has 30,486,002 users who have registered a username(...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o...

Ah I see. Still disingenuous to call them editors since the page I linked to actually counts anyone who has made a minimum of 5 edits recently. Those non-editors with accounts wouldn't participate in the discussion anyway and are probably inactive accounts.

If you have read the Daily Fail more than once (which i would not inflict on you without fair warning) you will not be surprised by such things

They probably went by the number of registered accounts (which I didn't check). Not that it isn't terribly misleading anyway.

> registered accounts

This is what they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians

N.B "The English Wikipedia currently has 30,486,002[2] users who have registered a username. Only a minority of users contribute regularly (141,468[3] have edited in the last 30 days), and only a minority of those contributors participate in community discussions. An unknown but relatively large number of unregistered Wikipedians also contribute to the site."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com