Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism". Wikipedians sometimes award one another "virtual barnstars" for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, ministrative actions, and types of articulation work. Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked t. Jimmy Wales once argued that "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" mak
es the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is tfore "much like any tritional organization". In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he d h large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. The English Wikipedia has 6,409,890 articles, 42,569,132 registered editors, and 125,342 active editors. An editor is considered active if they have me one or more edits in the past 30 days. Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may tar or their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-t
rivial s: the contributor is expected to l Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute re process, and l a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references". Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia, as "participants are aced by s of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation", but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized by their IP dresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty. StudiesA 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of kledge as those contributors who register with the site". Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people ... And in fact
, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, Business Insider editor and journalist Henry Blod showed in 2009 that in a random of articles, most Wikipedia content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest d edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and atting is done by "insiders". A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, , and conscientious than others, although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher ness and that the differences with the control group and the s were small. According to a 2009 study, t is "evidence of grog resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content". Diversity
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