Contributor Math
February 14, 2008 – 10:56 amOf the 250 million people that use Wikipedia each month, only a small fraction ever contribute to an article. By my calculation (see this essay for details), only 1 in 1000 people contribute. This means if you know two or more people who regularly contribute to Wikipedia, you are defying the odds.
If you were to equate the populations of countries of the world to various Wikipedia groups, here’s what it would look like:
A Mature base and a clean slate
Wikipedia has a mature, massive base of useful information, so there is something for everyone. Those 999 out of 1000 can find the information they are looking for and that 1 in 1000 person can help make the information better.
There is every reason to suppose that this same 1:1000 ratio holds for Concharto, since our goals and methods are quite similar. Concharto, however, doesn’t yet have much information for those other 999 people. This means we are mostly interesting to the one-in-a-thousand people. This same thing happened at Wikipedia when it first started out and is one reason why it took two or three years before anyone had heard of Wikipedia (it has been around since 2002).
One in a Thousand
So if you are a one-in-a-thousand contributor, I would like to hear from you. What types of new features do you want? What isn’t working for you? How can we make Concharto better?
Contact me at frank (at) concharto(dot) com - or leave feedback on our feedback form.
(Updated 4/28/08 - changed name from timespacemap to concharto)
