Wikipedia's editors are any recruits who can show that they have the talent to write and upgrade encyclopedia articles. Nothing else counts for much. Contributor anonymity is acceptable, in large part because who you are or what prior background you have is not supposed to have any effect on your contributions being accepted, as long as you respect the content policies. Whether you're a teenager or a tenured Ph.D. doesn't matter: On Wikipedia, no one needs to know you're a Doc.

Because no personal data is collected during the registration process, assumptions and information about contributor demographics are largely anecdotal. Although many editors chose to reveal parts of their identity publicly, either on their user page or in another forum (such as what they do for a living or their real name), many others do not. Meetups provide some information, but this is a self-selected group. The German-language Wikipedia, which is distinctly more academic in tone, has given some survey results suggesting a median age in the late 20s for editors.

One thing that is clear from the English-language Wikipedia is that native English speakers do not necessarily predominate. Wikipedia has many editors for whom English is a second language, and they have historically played a large part in building the site. Some edit Wikipedias in two or more languages. See Chapter 15, 200 Languages and Counting for more.

If you think of Wikipedia purely as an encyclopedia, its coverage of current affairs and popular culture might seem disproportionate. For instance, around half the biographies are about living people: Much effort is devoted to upgrading those 200,000 articles because real lives can be affected by the content available on Wikipedia. But what about the antiquarian, the obscure but scholarly, and topics not so well known in the English-speaking world?

Systemic bias is a term used on Wikipedia to describe the concept that notions of notability and breadth of article coverage both reflect the community of editors and their demographic. And indeed, Wikipedia's coverage is skewed toward subjects relating to Anglophone countries. For example, articles about people and places in the developing world are often missing or incomplete compared to articles about North American and European geography and personalities. Topics related to women (such as biographies of famous women or articles about feminism) are underrepresented, along with articles about blue-collar trades. This is a known problem but not one easy to address with policy. (The term systemic bias is not to be confused with systematic bias, which is one kind of violation of Neutral Point of View, where a given article or group of articles is one-sided.)

The articles that prosper on Wikipedia, generally speaking, are those that when created can immediately be linked to from existing articles and that attract editors (other than the initial author) who are active in the same general area. These positive factors can also be read the other way: If an area is somewhat neglected in Wikipedia, a new article's life cycle (Chapter 10, The Life Cycle of an Article) is initiated in a less favorable environment.

These issues are more easily understood than remedied. Volunteer editors will choose the areas they want to work on, and Wikipedia can't legislate its way into being more representative. The community must also work through the founder effect, a concept from evolution that the system will, for some time, remember or be influenced by characteristics of the founding group, rather than the larger population. See [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias]] (shortcut WP:BIAS) for a dedicated forum on this topic.

All is not gloom, though, since Wikipedia does gradually overcome some of these limitations. Individual WikiProjects are created for weaker areas that need work (such as [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Gender Studies]]), and Wikipedia attracts some academic experts and others who do steady work filling in gaps in coverage. Working on a neglected area can be rewarding as well, as there is more opportunity to create new articles.

Wikipedians love to write about Wikipedia. This is revealed in the large number of essays about the site, posted both on user talk pages and project pages. Happy, sad, critical, and usually interesting, these essays are a mosaic of opinions about the site, its people, and its governance. An essay may aim to influence site policies or the way people behave or may simply be self-expression, one small addition to the site's culture. Many end up being cited by other editors in discussions, and some even end up as guideline or policy.

Here is a selection of extracts from a small handful of our favorite essays. Some of them connect to points that are made elsewhere in this book, whereas others concern thought-provoking aspects of Wikipedia that we don't follow up.

You can find many other such essays collected in [[Category:Wikipedia essays]]. Many Wikipedians also blog about Wikipedia and related Wikimedia issues. You can find a list of self-identified bloggers on Meta, but for easier and more focused reading, you can find a collection of blogs about Wikimedia topics at the Planet Wikimedia site, where they are conveniently aggregated; see http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/. An RSS feed is also available.

One essay in particular, known as "Raul's laws" (shortcut WP:RAUL), contains a collection of observations on how Wikipedia works and how Wikipedians work together. The essay was started by User:Raul654, an experienced contributor, but has been built by dozens of contributors. The page gives what is very much an insider's view of how Wikipedia works, though the later laws that have been added vary greatly in interest.

We've taken 6 "laws" from the original 15. Two bits of jargon are [[Astroturfing]], a public relations term for an orchestrated campaign meant to look like spontaneous grassroots activity and [[Metcalfe's law]], which points to the square of the number of users in a network as a measure of its value.

Wikipedia has no centralized control, yet the site progresses and is successful. The administration of Wikipedia as a whole has scaled up much better than its critics predicted. Something clearly does work. But what is it that works?

Discussion alone may not achieve much. If no meeting of minds occurs, a productive debate can become an unresolvable dispute. A common theme in interviews with editors turns out to be this: Wikipedians clearly feel they share values with others who are editing.

These values include the following:

Wikis attract people who can live with freeform structures. But shared and practical values mean that Wikipedians will admit that some structure is necessary and some idea of how the encyclopedia should be built has to be present. Wikipedia's structures, such as how editing permissions are provided, must match up with these core values.

The key way Wikipedia gets through its project-related work is its characteristic structure: Processes consist of decentralized discussions about separable issues. That's how decisions are actually made and how site administration moves forward. Backlogs are avoided by limiting discussion time. These processes are, in turn, governed by policy documents that have general consent. (Chapter 13, Policy and Your Input picks up from here and will explain how you can have wiki-style editable policy.)

Policy and process, then, are closely related on Wikipedia, providing a structure for editors to work together through discussion. So much needs to be done that the sensible approach that has evolved is to have all those differentiated processes, not a single executive body. Processes and policies, despite their imperfections, evolve to meet changing circumstances. See an overview essay [[Wikipedia:Product, process, policy]] (shortcut WP:3P) for more on this idea.

At this point, we still simply don't know some things.

See [[Wikipedia:Researching Wikipedia]] (shortcut WP:RW) for some ideas for studies. [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies]] showcases some work that has already been done.