Wikipedia:Wikipedians

Wikipedians are the people who write and edit articles for Wikipedia. Some people might think that Wikipedist would be a more appropriate name, as an encyclopedist is someone who contributes to an encyclopedia. The ending of Wikipedian, though, suggests being part of a group or community. So in this sense, Wikipedians are people who form Community Portal.

The number of Wikipedians has grown to more than 1.6 million (1 600 000 — counting registered user accounts), plus an unknown, but quite large, number of unregistered contributors. Detailed statistical information about Wikipedia is available at Statistics.

The diversity of Wikipedians renders it nearly impossible to make many categorical statements about Wikipedians as a whole. Information about many registered Wikipedians is available on their user pages. However, users are not required to create these pages or post information on them.

You could think of Wikipedians as a global ant colony, except there's no queen, and users choose their own roles. Some Wikipedians WC; some Wikipedians KC. Some upload images; some work on history articles; and still others work on reverting vandalism. Many take on all of these tasks. Whatever you decide to do, every Wikipedian is valuable.

This page contains lists of Wikipedians by country, as well as various other groupings. Different categories have been created due to demand. Individual Wikipedians may add themselves to appropriate lists if they wish. It is suggested that if you put your name on one of the more specific lists, you should also include it on the alphabetical list.

Listing by area of responsibility

Some Wikipedians have additional responsibility or authority. Here is a list of functional groups at Wikipedia itself:

Arbitration committee
Bureaucrats
Requests for checkuser - Involved in certain types of abuse investigations
List of Administrators
OTRS/personnel (list includes other languages and projects as well)
IRC - Wikipedians who can deal with management issues regarding the #wikipedia IRC channel at Freenode
Mailing list - Mailing list moderation and management

In addition there are some groups that serve the entire Wikimedia foundation, including Wikipedians in languages other than English and sister projects such as commons, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks:

Board of Trustees - Oversight
Developers - Technical access to servers
IRC Group Contacts - dealing with permissions, hostname cloaks, and related IRC matters
Stewards - Can revoke permissions when necessary and will grant permissions on small projects that lack an internal process for doing so

Finally there are several key individuals who have special responsibilities unique to them:

Jimbo Wales, project founder
Danny, working fulltime for the Wikimedia Foundation
BradPatrick, the foundation's general counsel and interim executive director

Listing by region

See Category:Wikipedians and Category:Wikipedians by location for more info.

Please see the new project page at User categorisation to help!

Other listings

All lists are strictly voluntary. We encourage you to spend your time categorising our encyclopedic content, rather than categorising yourself!

Many of these lists are eligible for replacement by categories. Please see User categorization to help!

Listings on

Skills-based listings

We can all string a few words together (some better than others), but Wikipedia is in need of contributors with other skills. If you are proficient in any of the following skills, please add your technological distinctiveness to the collective.

Wikipedian associations

Some Wikipedians have formed voluntary associations to participate in various activities on Wikipedia. Consult their pages if you are interested in joining.

See Category:Wikipedian organizations