LAWYERS AMONG WIKIPEDIANS – A STATISTICAL SKETCH

Abstract

Wikipedia is a virtual organization. It is a phenomenon of the Internet culture, which attracts millions of readers and thousands of volunteers. It is an encyclopaedia created on the basis of a free licence and its contents can be copied and modified by anyone. Some of the important rules of Wikipedia are the following: respecting encyclopaedic content, neutral point of view and verifiability of contents, i.e. basing on the sources which have been already published. One should not enter to Wikipedia theses, which have not been published before, e.g. not published outcomes of one’s own experiments or observations. There are lawyers among wikipedians, and as at 15 August 2013 there were 279 users declaring the familiarity with the legal terminology. Among them there were 4.3% declaring as female users (12 users). There were 42.3% from the group above (118 users) who have not achieved the editing number higher than 100, and 73 persons who gave up editing. Therefore, there are the remaining 88 users of Wikipedia with the input higher than or equal to 100 editions and active in 2013. This constituted 31.5% of the surveyed group, which was analyzed in the article.