Tag: Wikipedia

Another Wikipedia murder

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the pleasures of reading the Wikipediocracy forum, as I do from time to time, is to see hard evidence of what I experienced myself, that it is very dangerous for ordinary people to attempt to contribute to Wikipedia.

Today’s thread discusses a long term editor hiding behind the name “MaterialScientist”.  This post comments:

You should talk to Artem R. Oganov about his long running dispute with Materialscientist. He got indefinitely blocked, then unblocked on the condition he didn’t edit subjects of his expertise. He decided to wash his hands and walk away.

“Some time ago I entered Wikipedia using my own name, which was a mistake. Now, due to the continuing smear campaign by the user Materialscientist, I want to completely withdraw from Wikipedia both my account an any mentions of my former relations to it. Now I know the identity of the user Materialscientist, and have proofs that he does not act as an impartial editor, but instead is involved in a conflict of interest with my group. Moreover, he uses every opportunity to attack my real name …”

Dr Oganov is a professor of Geosciences at Stony Brook University, and is responsible for breakthrough discoveries in Boron science (link to New York Times article).  “MaterialScientist” is … well, someone who doesn’t care to put his name to his work.

Dr Oganov was accused of “sock-puppeting”.  The real meaning of this term is someone who uses several accounts to give the false impression of multiple people.  However in Wikipedia it gets used for anyone who someone doesn’t like who has used more than one account on the system; say, perhaps, if he has edited under his own name and then found himself the target of a vicious campaign of personal attacks designed to ruin his real-world reputation. 

The disgusting “trial” is here.  The accusation was made by “MaterialScientist”, who submitted “evidence” under his alternative account “NIMSOffice”.  Likewise it is fairly obvious that “Uncle G” is a pawn of “MaterialScientist”, rather than an unbiased bystander; using one minor account to shriek accusations, and the main account to pretend to be calm and unbiased.  I have myself been the victim of just this techniqe.

No doubt MaterialScientist maneouvred cleverly, and played the game to win.  Bait your foe into hiding behind a false identity, use obvious socks and tempt him to respond in kind; and then accuse him of sock-puppeting with some pre-warned friends to implement a ban … nice.  

I have no doubt that Dr Oganov was very hurt by the treatment he received.  And … what kind of morons, finding that they have a world-expert on hand, issue him a  ban from editing on the topic of his expertise?!  You couldn’t make it up.

The end result was that one of the major scientists in Boron studies was forced out of Wikipedia.  And I suspect that this happens quite a lot.

Don’t contribute to Wikipedia.  The owners do not care what happens to any of the contributors, while the place is overrun with low-lifes, who will, coldly and deliberately, do you an injury while remaining anonymous themselves.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Updated versions of the translation of the Passio Petri and Passio Pauli from the Acts of ps.Linus have arrived.  I will need to read these tonight, but they must be nearly complete, which is good news.

I have been making enquiries about the supposed existence of a third volume of Maarten Vermaseren’s CIMRM collection of inscriptions and reliefs about Mithras.  The theory is that he had composed a third volume, to contain the literary testimonies; but this was unpublished at his death.  However I am informed that this is not true; and worse, that Vermaseren gave orders before his death for all his scholarly papers to be destroyed.  I am enquiring a little further, but I suspect that CIMRM III will have to be filed with the pseudo-biblia.

I’m also interested in exploring a little whether the CIMRM can be got online.  They are, admittedly, outdated.  Plans for a supplement never came to anything.  There are scholars interested in creating some new resource, but unable to get funding.  So, as the CIMRM volumes are out of print, I wonder whether Brill would allow them to appear online?  It probably depends on finding someone friendly at Brill to ask.

 I’m still reading some of the material at the Wikipediocracy forum.   There is a book in prospect about the history of Wikipedia.  One item in this will be details of the WorldTraveller incident.   WorldTraveller was a longstanding and valued contributor, who was forced out of Wikipedia by an admin who contributed nothing, and broke all the “rules” to do down his foe.  The details are sordid, and show clearly that Wikipedia’s policies do not work, even in very blatant cases.  As Peter Damian remarks:

So, a researcher at a top UK institution, later to become a professional astronomer, is blocked by an admin who knows nothing about astronomy, and whose contributions to Wikipedia include ‘paranormal’ topics, video games and comic books. I defy anyone to find a better example of admin abuse against content contributors than that.

The later block in March 2007 caused WT to pack his bags and leave for good.

Interestingly, the UK parliament has received representations about Wikipedia.   The hearings of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions from January 2012 are online in PDF form here.  On pages 483 to 493 is the testimony of Andreas Kolbe and Edward Buckner, itemising two problems, with specific examples:

  1. Wikipedia facilitates the publication of anonymous defamatory material, and has no practical mechanism for the victim to get it removed.
  2. Wikipedia publishes significant amounts of extreme porn, and some of those at the top of Wikimedia UK are involved in this.

The witnesses call for moves to make Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation more accountable.  Specifically they propose that the Charities Commission should oblige Wikipedia to fund a small but fully independent watchdog similar to the Press Complaints Committee, as a condition of its charitable status, to help enforce the controls which Wikipedia claims are in place but which the evidence shows is not. 

These modest proposals seem very sound to me.  The problems in Wikipedia administration run deep, but these two symptoms certainly need to be addressed. 

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Wikipediocracy: a Wikipedia-watch site

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Incoming links revealed to me the existence of the Wikipediocracy site this weekend.

Our Mission: We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with the structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense that issues forth from one of the world’s most frequently visited websites, the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

I wish them well.  Wikipedia presents itself as the encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  But a very large number of people have found themselves drawn into disputes with anonymous trolls there, and then found that Wikipedia’s processes are opaque, arbitary, unfair, administered by children and more trolls, and most of these ordinary people have been forced out or been left bruised and upset.  It’s not a safe place.  And it’s very hard to get past the puff to the reality, not least because Wikipedia policy is to hide information critical of Wikipedia. 

Inevitably the forum contains a certain amount of complaining.  People are likely to arrive here bleeding, after all.  But I have already learned of various meta- and para-wikipedia organisations, chapters, mailing lists and so forth, the existence of which is probably known to a tiny handful.  Most of those who contribute to Wikipedia will not realise that their fate will be decided, not openly, but by one of these backstairs methods.

Recommended.

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Wikipedia bans the chairman of the Wikimedia charity

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There will be a more than a few people chortling today, at the news that the reclusive gang of anonymous editors who control Wikipedia have now banned a user who is, wait for it, chairman of the charity that raises funds for Wikipedia.  According to the Daily Telegraph, Ashley van Haeften, known as Fae was banned for “numerous violations of Wikipedia’s norms and policies”.

Ashley van Haeften is chairman of Wikimedia UK, a charity with an £1m annual budget funded by donations by Wikipedia visitors and dedicated to promoting the website among British museums and universities.

Naturally he has now resigned.

His resignation follows a call by members of Wikimedia UK for an Extraordinary General Meeting to discuss the controversy. They said the decision of the charity’s board to keep Mr van Haeften on as chairman despite his ban from contributing to Wikipedia “not a sufficient response to this situation”.

An EGM could still go ahead, however, as the call was for a vote on a resolution “to remove Ashley Van Haeften from the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia UK”, not only to strip him of the chairmanship.

“By not resigning as chair immediately after the ArbCom decision was announced I am afraid that [Mr van Haeften] made an error which can now only be corrected by his resignation from the board altogether,” said one Wikimedia UK member.

Serious stuff!  No doubt even this will not be enough, and the inevitable next step is imprisonment, and the sale of his children into slavery.  Such measures could hardly be an adequate response to his many and serious crimes, but they are perhaps the most that could be done.

But what were his crimes, exactly?  It is curiously awkward, for an online site, for any normal person to find out.  I tend not to believe the spin statements in the Telegraph articles.  These suggest that the issue is pornography in Wikipedia.  But … where’s the evidence of this?

The “case” before the “court” may be found here, and makes wretched reading.  An accusation is made by a certain Michael Bisanz, rather diffuse, complaining that … well, erm, what?  Digging into it, I find hurt feelings on the part of the accuser:

… you have made extreme accusations as to my character as an editor and I request a determination by some authority to clear my name, unless you are willing to withdraw your allegations of abuse of my trusted status. I understand you are going on a trip, but letting the allegations lay on the table and further sully my name is unacceptable.

Erm, and this is a crime, is it?  The “offences” urged are trifling, urged as if they were great crimes.

And I find another “request for comment” on Mr van Haeften here, which is referenced in the accusation.  The latter comments:

The RFC/U was created by Delicious carbuncle (DC) in conjunction with a series of canvassing threads of Wikipedia Review that included a large number of personal allegations …

The user “Delicious carbuncle” was himself “admonished” during all this, at which, no doubt, he quaked.

Reading even a small portion of all this tripe would weary any normal person.  So much of it consists of personal comments, attacks, and insinuations.  Very little of this material would be admissible as evidence in any judicial environment.   None of this rubbish would be acceptable to any fair person. 

People contribute to Wikipedia because they want to add content.  They get a good feeling from so doing.  Once they are being subjected to a process of accusations by strangers sustained over a period of months or years, that drains the will to continue.  Most just leave, I suspect, although we don’t really know.  The process itself is the punishment, and any malicious user can target another in this way.  Such a process is nothing less than assault, and it should be treated as such.

Mr van Haeften has referred to being “hounded”.  Just looking at those few pages, the complaint seems amply justified.  There is nothing of substance in all this piffle, as far as I can see; but ample evidence of people tussling to get their way. 

There are allegations that Mr van Haeften may be addicted to various loathsome (but legal) vices, as his accusers allege (and he does not deny).  But whatever has that to do with the matter?

The “verdict” states:

Fæ has been the target of a sustained campaign of criticism and some harassment, related to images that he has uploaded to Wikipedia’s sister site, Wikimedia Commons, his administrator status on Wikipedia, and his role involving a Wikimedia Foundation-related charity. However, he has at times failed to differentiate between those who are harassing him, and those with good-faith concerns.

No doubt a user who is the “target of a sustained campaign of criticism and some harassment” may indeed “fail to differentiate” between the different classes of his tormenters.  There is also a complaint that Mr van Haeften used more than one account with which to edit. But this is not forbidden in Wikipedia.  Indeed a user being attacked under one name may naturally create another in order to continue to contribute elsewhere without obstruction.  It only becomes sock-puppeting when multiple users are used to create the impression of several different people.  There is no suggestion that he was using these in that way, so the accusation seems to be merely a convenient stick with which to beat him.

And there we have it.  The many, serious crimes turn out to be, erm … nothing much.  The dispute resolution pages appear to be mainly about the person, not the edits. 

I have remarked in the past that the Wikipedia dispute resolution is broken.  This seems to be another example of it. 

Mr van Haeften must now be drinking the bitter cup of many another ex-contributor to Wikipedia, who has come to regret that he ever gave any of his time or energy to the site.

Reform of Wikipedia’s Byzantine and unfair administration is required.  Simple justice towards those who try to contribute and find themselves victimised demands it.  It is surely time and past time that it was subjected to legal scrutiny.

Mr van Haeften might consider consulting a firm of British libel lawyers and pointing them at the statements on these Wikipedia pages.   For in England, when a case of libel is brought, the onus is on the defendant to prove that the statements are not defamatory.  I would usually feel that this is excessive; but the outcome could only serve the public good, in this case.

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The Acta Pauli blog and Wikipedia trolls

Posted on by Roger Pearse

By accident last night I came across the Acta Pauli blog.  I was hitherto unaware that this group blog existed.  It is, of course, dedicated to the study of the apocryphal Acts of Paul, and their better known extract, the Acts of Paul and Thecla.  The blog contains much useful information on this text, not least that discoveries of portions of it are a continuing process.

It seems that I am not the only one to attempt to contribute to Wikipedia, and to get receive harassment and insults in return.  There is a series of posts in which one of the authors describes his attempts to do so.  One of them is this one. 

I therefore recommend that scholars like myself not bother to make edits on that platform where any non-specialist can take them down within seconds. Scholars don’t have the time to waste on such games.

It turns out that the “administrator” harassing him was 14 years old (!) at the time:

I’ve learned that Anonymous Dissident, who removed my links from the French and German articles on the Acts of Paul and Thecla, is 12 approximately 14 years old.  Wow, that’s pretty cool Wikipedia!  A 12 approximately 14 year old is able to eliminate a link to this site which is being published by people with PhDs.  Now I’m sure that Anonymous Dissident is very mature for the age of 12 approximately 14, but it does lower the status of Wikipedia considerably when scholars can’t even add a little insignificant link to your so-called encyclopedia.

The author of the blog is considerably more courteous to this impudent schoolboy than I would be.  Indeed the author chose to write a post, highlighting the failures of the article on the Acta Pauli.  His reward was might be expected: a prolonged and insulting jeer about “disaffected whinings”, combined with a statement that the troll proposed to appropriate his comments and use them himself on the article.

Wikipedia is not a safe place for sensible people to participate.  And until the likes of “Anonymous Dissident” are expelled from it, it will continue to be a very dangerous place for contributors.

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Using aliases to manipulate debate online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jim Davila at Paleojudaica notes an interesting article and makes some useful comments upon it:

 Are online aliases ever justified in academic debate? Sock puppets – online commenters that create a false identity – are disrupting academic freedom and scholarly debate, says Simon Tanner (The Guardian).

If it’s just a matter of discussing evidence and debating rational arguments, it doesn’t really matter whether one knows all the names of the debaters. … But, that said, there is rarely a compelling reason to conceal one’s identity in tempest-in-a-teapot academic debates  …  human nature being what it is, Internet anonymity leads some people to do things they would never do in their own name.

Sock puppetry goes beyond presenting arguments anonymously for an unpopular position and deliberately creates the impression that more people are making the arguments than actually are. (This amounts to a twisted appeal to the authority of numbers to give the impression of a false controversy or even a false consensus.)

The showpiece example of sock puppetry run amok is the Raphael Golb affair involving the Dead Sea Scrolls (more background here and links), which Tanner mentions, citing Robert Cargill. This case moved from mere nuisance trolling to an attempt actually to damage the reputation of a prominent academic, and it illustrates sock puppetry’s potential for real harm.

The Tanner article is very sound.

Have you encountered a sock puppet recently? The answer is probably yes even if you never knew. I met one (well several) the other day and it was quite an experience – a bit like getting mugged by a chimera. Sock puppets, referencing the cute and simple hand puppets made from a sock, are intended primarily to deceive. This is not the anonymity we all sometimes seek when online; sock puppetry is about setting up a false identity so the puppeteer can speak falsely while pretending to be another person.

Some of the craziest uses of sock puppetry are when these misleading online identities end up working in unison: simultaneously praising and defending their alter egos while attacking, stalking or even libelling and defaming people or organisations they don’t like. All the while never admitting the link or affiliation to the puppeteer.

Sock puppetry, and covert campaigns to subvert the consensus of any sort, are hideously dishonest.  But the use of it to damage the reputation of real people by means of false identities, created for the purpose, is interesting.  I would never had thought that it had that end in mind.  Yet my own experience echoes that of both these writers.

The only experience that I have ever had of sock puppetry was just such a case.  After contributing for two years to the Mithras article in Wikipedia, and researching every statement in it, one worthless individual who knew nothing about the subject turned up under at least two identities and fought a war to gain control of the article.  One identity was used to provoke trouble, hurl accusations, yell insults and generally try to start a fight; while the other  was used to make complaints to Wikipedia about any response from the victims, and to engage in “brinking”.  I subsequently learned that this is a common technique from sock-puppeters.

The troll’s determination to injure my own reputation, as the only person present who really knew about Mithras, knew no apparent limits.  After several months of harassment against every editor who objected in any way, he got hold of a corrupt administrator (also anonymous), and made a false accusation of  sock puppeting against myself.  I didn’t take it seriously, since I had never edited that article under any other name, and was the only person NOT using a false name.[1]  But then I found the administrator wouldn’t hear me, and I was actually banned for something that had never occurred, on an evidently malicious accusation, made by an anonymous troll via two sock puppets, without any input from myself, and despite my attempts to defend myself.  Such is the power of a false accusation, made, apparently, by several people!  The troll then settled down to the charmless task of repeating the libel ad nauseam, to deflect attention from his own violation of the article, and for all I know may be at it yet.  His second account now being redundant, he ceased using it.

Now Wikipedia is notoriously an unsafe environment for any normal person with any actual knowledge.  The contributors are treated as meat, and chewed up by those who have no interest in contributing.  But the general problem is anonymity.   Sock puppeting is a consequence of it, facilitated by the fact that no-one knows who they are dealing with.  Bad coin drives out good.  In Wikipedia, fewer and fewer people dare use their own names.

The troll had no claim to authority, so he resorted to violence to get his way, and sock-puppeting as his method.  He made use of the fact that his victim was posting under his own name to run his smear campaign.  But it is unlikely that he would have done so, had his own identity been involved.  But even then, he could not have achieved his end without manufacturing “support”.

Likewise the administrator would have hesitated to use Wikipedia to label someone unheard guilty of something that never happened, had his own identity been at stake.

It’s worth being aware of this tactic.  But how sad it is, that the web will have to be regulated, merely to deal with these forms of dishonesty!

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  1. [1]After months of harassment under my own name, I had experimented with creating a pseudonymous account — like everyone else — so that I could resume contributing elsewhere.  I made a couple of edits using this identity to the Mithras liturgy article, where no edit war was in progress.  But in fact I didn’t like editing under a name other than my own, so I  stopped using it.  The existence of a second account was later on made the excuse for banning me, despite the fact that I never edited the Mithras article using it and never used it for sock puppetting.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email with some material extracted from Matthieu Cassin’s thesis about Gregory of Nyssa, with the pages discussing the chapter titles in the manuscripts.  I’ve not had a chance to read it yet, but it looks fascinating.  Dr Cassin has done some real work here, and I will discuss it further.

Also I found myself thinking about Mithras today.  Readers will remember that between 2009 and the end of 2010 I revised the Wikipedia Mithras article, to produce something reliable, only to have the work hijacked by a troll.  The troll deleted all references to me — the author of most of it! — and changed it to “prove” that Mithras preceded Jesus, etc; and he has sat on it, dog-in-the-manger, ever since.  But in a way he did me a favour, since I was beginning to contribute far too much time to Wikipedia.

But the reason that I dedicated so much time to looking up and verifying and quoting so much material about Mithras was to dispose of the many myths that circulate online.  That reason is still valid, and it seems to me that it would be sensible to write a few pages about Mithras, using secondary sources of a reliable kind, in order to provide a useful resource to those who need it. 

The obvious thing to do would be to start with the last reliable version — nothing the troll did was of any value –, and remove whichever bits I have not written or validated myself, and then build on that.  

There would be a main page, consisting of short sections, each with a link to a page on that specific subject.  Each sentence in the short sections would be referenced; probably to a reference on the specific page, rather than on the main page.

It would be important to have a professional look to the pages.  I’m not sure how best to achieve that, short of hiring someone (which, of course, is an option).  Some nice graphics would be nice, if I knew a decent graphics designer who could draw…

Ideally the pages would be editable online; but at the moment I couldn’t spare the time for online editing anyway.  I don’t really want to install MediaWiki, so we may have to sacrifice that, and just fall back on some kind of HTML editing.

The object, as always, would be to allow a reader to access the subject, not to push a narrative or my opinions (indeed I have none on Mithras, except that I don’t want to see disinformation circulating).

As part of this, my policy is always to have references that quote the source in extenso, and to link to the online text where possible.  In this way the reader can verify for himself whether or not the reference is fair or accurate.  I did this, after I discovered that most of the references in the Wikipedia Mithras article, before I worked on it, were in fact bogus.  Quote and link makes that problem disappear, and I would continue it.

Naturally I would want to link closely to primary materials.  It would be right to do something about inscriptions and images, if one could.

A page on Mithra, the Persian deity whose name was probably borrowed by the unknown founder of the Mithras cult, would probably be useful.

A guestbook in which comments and feedback could be added would probably be useful also.

Ah, but when will I get the *time*!!!!

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So, farewell, O dead tree Encyclopedia Britannica

Posted on by Roger Pearse

News today that Encyclopedia Britannica has decided not to print any more editions of its encyclopedia.  Sales of the paper version have been “negligible” for years, and 85% of the income comes from the online version.  I would imagine these sales are licenses to libraries and the like.  There is, apparently, some gloating from some anonymous erk in Wikipedia — the ‘encyclopedia’ that any teenager can edit (and especially Randy in Boise).

It’s a key moment, isn’t it?  The paper encyclopedia is now definitely dead.  That is, the major reference source until 1995 is now history. 

Any reference source in paper form is now obsolete.  Any source that is not read from end to end, but instead is accessed in bits and pieces, is now on borrowed time.  There are any number of such handbooks — we might think of the Clavis Patrum Graecorum.  They’re all dead meat, and just waiting to be collected.  They cannot, commercially, exist on paper any more.

It’s a brave new world.

Mind you, I do wish someone would sue the hell out of Wikipedia and force it to institute some proper controls and regulation of trolls.  It can’t grow much beyond its current status as “collection of hearsay”, until this is addressed.

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An amusing critique of Wikipedia and the people who run it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Quite by accident I found myself looking at this page (not safe for work), which calls itself “Encyclopedia Dramatica”.  It has some pithy (and very rude) things to say about Wikipedia.  The format would tend to make most of us dismiss it, but much of it is at least half true, and will bring a smile to anyone who has tried to improve Wikipedia.

The average age of a Wikipedia admin is 17. WTF? And that, buddy, is skewed upwards by the presence of a handful of degenerates whose only social outlet is their band of fellow children. Yes, one of the world’s largest Internet communities is run by cliquey kids! As one would expect, leaving day-to-day operations to a bunch of greasy-palmed kids is a recipe for full-scale faggotry. Imagine the biggest losers and social misfits from high school — the hormonal angst, the zit cases, the dateless geeks, the fatties and dorks — and ponder their collective teeny-angst and anger. Now give them the power to run a massive online community and create their own governance with no oversight. When even nominal editing on Wikipedia results in user flame wars that bring in heavy-handed “administrator” attention, the question potential wiki-users should ask themselves is, Do I really want my knowledge, even my person, to be judged, juried, and executed by Piggy, Roger and Jack with his choirboys? (That’s a Lord of the Flies reference. Look it up. Or watch the movie, which was pretty cool too).

The Wikimedia Foundation is just peachy with this jacked-up state of affairs, going so far as to brag about it. As John Seigenthaler found out, they believe themselves immune to legal threats. As a non-profit, they have no assets (although Jimmy Wales has a collection of sports cars). While they claim immunity as an “Internet Host”, some would argue that the foundation’s structure makes them liable as publishers. The next step would be to pass the buck to their contributors and operations, who are suit-immune minors or anonymous.

This is only part of it.  The article at the site on Wikipedia (think very hard before clicking on this link at all — lots of porn and abuse in it) contains further gems:

World of Wikipædia?, or Wikipedia, is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game …

During gameplay, Wikipedia players can gain more authority as they progress, with “Administrator” and “Double-O Licensed” rankings granting them access to GOD MODE. While the rules for winning the game are a tightly-kept secret, it is believed that the winner is treated to a night of accolades and praise from Wikipedia overlord Jimbo Wales. …

A common misconception is that “Wikipedia is never finished.” Remember that whenever you come by a Wikipedia article was forged from the blood of thousands of angsty teenagers edit warring over really important facts about the world. Information on Wikipedia topics could generally be found through Google (that is, unless a Wikipedia article is the first hit) and other forms of reference material like books my senile uncle’s war stories, but Americ**** are too busy … to be bothered with education. …

The real problem with Wikipedia is the Wikipedians. From players to sysops, every member of its community is the scum of the internets – worse than spammers, worse than script kiddies and Nigerian scammers, and worse than IRCers. An average Wikipedia user has the intelligence of a seal…

Wikipedia is full of people with no desire to improve what it is intended for, information. Instead, they want to grow their e-***** and one day become a mod.

Well, it made me smile.  There’s much truth in all that, mixed with a substantial portion of exaggeration and one-sidedness, of course.

I wonder whether the average age of a Wikipedia admin really IS seventeen?  And how one would know?

UPDATE:  I have been looking around the web for some statistics, and finding nothing very definitive.  There’s a 2009 PDF based on a questionaire, which tells us that the average age of participants in the survey is 25.8; 25% are younger than 18, 25% are between 18-22, 25% are between 23 and 30, and the rest of us are in the remaining 25%.  But … this does not discriminate between users and editors.  Readers average 25.3, editors 26.8.  There’s no indication as to admin age. The actual number of respondents was only about 130,000.

The Wikipedia stats site does not collect this kind of information, unfortunately.

UPDATE: An interesting critique here: “The closed, unfriendly world of Wikipedia.” 

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