The People Who Write It Screensaver
The The People Who Write It screensaver shows active editors per month on a Wikipedia edition, key-less. Editor here means anyone who made at least one edit that month, the most generous definition available — the count doing substantial work is far smaller. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
Live preview
Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the The People Who Write It screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
Active editors per month on a Wikipedia edition, key-less. Editor here means anyone who made at least one edit that month, the most generous definition available — the count doing substantial work is far smaller.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
How Wikipedia counts its editors
Wikipedia is written by volunteers, and the Wikimedia Foundation publishes statistics on how many of them there are through a public analytics interface. For each language edition it reports editors per calendar month, which is the figure plotted here.
How you define editor changes the number dramatically. The setting used here counts anyone with at least one edit in the month, which includes passers-by fixing a typo. Wikimedia’s long-used definition of an active editor is stricter: a non-bot account with at least five edits to content pages in a month (the Special:Statistics “active users” figure is different, counting any account with a recorded action in the last 30 days). Wikimedia’s own research pages call the five-edit threshold relatively arbitrary, though it has been used for a long time.
Differences between editions are large because the languages have very different numbers of speakers and online communities. A language with millions of readers may still have a small base of regular editors, which limits how fast its articles grow. Because the counts are for whole calendar months, month-to-month comparisons are most meaningful between complete months.
A worked example
Active editors per month on a Wikipedia edition, key-less. Editor here means anyone who made at least one edit that month, the most generous definition available — the count doing substantial work is far smaller.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- Do bots count as editors?
- Wikimedia’s active-editor definition excludes bots, and the analytics interface lets you filter by editor type. Bots do a lot of routine work, but they are not human volunteers.
- Why is the stricter active-editor figure lower?
- Requiring five or more edits excludes occasional contributors, leaving a core of regular volunteers.
- Why do language editions differ so much?
- They depend on how many people speak the language, are online and have chosen to volunteer, so editor numbers are not proportional to readership.