How many hours?

A newly released (and very interesting) paper – Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia – looks at estimating the level of participation in Wikipedia using an estimate of time spent contributing, rather than previous studies based on raw edit numbers, etc.

Their headline figure is an estimate that all of Wikipedia, up to an unspecified date in 2012, represents “a total of 102,673,683 total labor-hours”.

As David White noticed, this is many lifetimes of labour:

Some other ways to visualise these numbers:

  • Three years work by a mid-sized university of around 15,000 people (assuming a working day of eight hours and 250 working days in the year)
  • The users of the British Library reading rooms (capacity ~1500) working for thirty-three years.
  • One thousand “productive lives” (days as above, over fifty years, rather than 24/7 cradle to grave)

Or, in a sharp demonstration of the “cognitive surplus” theory:

  • Seven minutes writing time each from the global audience of the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.

All of Wikipedia, in all its languages, could have been written in the time it took the world to make a cup of tea during the speeches.

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