As I write, the question is, “What stops most people from editing Wikipedia pages?” and it is early March 2021.

One of the biggest reasons is that you need internet access, there are over 7000 million people alive today, and a large proportion, possibly a majority, don’t have internet access, or at least not leisuretime access.

Probably the second biggest reason is that Wikipedia’s mobile interface is optimised for reading not for editing. There are a few editors who use smartphones or tablets, but they are seriously rare.

Among those people who do have PC access, a sizable minority are in countries which restrict access to Wikipedia such as China, North Korea, Cuba, and until recently Turkey - it is a fairly common thing for authoritarian governments to do.

Orthogonal to all the above is the need to have free time, no great surprise that parents of young children are a really rare demographic in the active Wikipedia editing community. Lack of free time is definitely a barrier to being active, but editing is something that can be done in minutes every few months.

Then there is the issue of altruism, giving time freely to a project that aims to make the sum of human knowledge freely available to all is a very altruistic thing, it probably seems weird to those who aren’t altruists.

Then there is the barrier of having to cite sources, a barrier that didn’t exist during Wikipedia’s era of exponential growth from 2001 to 2007. Standards have risen, and a sizable minority of the Wikipedia community were lost in the era when unsourced additions became more and more likely to simply be rejected.

It’s against the rules to edit articles about yourself. However, if you see something that’s incorrect you can mention it on the article’s Talk page. For some reason, it works better if a friend mentions it. That’s usually how it works with famous people.

UPDATE: Wikipedia has strict rules about articles on living persons. First, they can’t be libelous. If you say something bad about somebody, there have to be very solid references to back it up. (In the US, libel laws only apply to living persons.) Also, you can’t say bad stuff about people if it’s just trivia (“not notable”) even if it’s true.

Let me give you an example, one of many millions.

When I started studying the Hebrew language, the very first thing that the teacher explained was that in the Hebrew alphabet the letters are only consonants, and the vowels are usually not written at all, and when they are really needed, they are written using special marks above, below or inside the letters. Some of those marks were duplicate. For example, there were two marks for the sound /u/, one of them called “Kubbutz”, and the other—“Shuruk”. The teacher didn't explain which sign is supposed to be written in which words—he only taught me to read them. When I later studied Hebrew grammar in high school, the teachers didn't explain it either, but I was curious and I kept wondering.

I kept wondering so intensely that I ended up doing a university degree in Hebrew language. There I finally learned when to write each of the mark. In fact, the university lecturer said that there is no one good textbook that explains all these grammar rules, and that they have to be looked up in several textbooks to actually get the full picture.

So I learned what I wanted, but I was unhappy that it took me eighteen years to finally find an answer. I wanted to make it easier for other people. So I invested a day in writing the article Kubutz and Shuruk in the English Wikipedia, and another day into writing the corresponding article in the Hebrew Wikipedia. These articles summarize all the relevant rules for writing these vowel marks from all the classic and modern grammar books. Now any person who is curious about this, can read all about it in one web page instead of digging up books in libraries and consulting teachers. This article can also be translated to other languages.

There is a story like this one behind every Wikipedia article, and there are many millions of them. Indeed, for some of the longer articles there are several such stories, because they were written by many people.

First a bit of fun:
Let me google that for you

Ok, I'm playing. If you look down that list, which is generated directly from the database, you'll see that a number of administrative/community pages are more highly edited than any actual article.

If you scan down the list you'll see that the most edited page is still the same as it has been for several years: George W. Bush

Not far behind though is:
Talk:Barack Obama

Notice that this is the talk page for Barack Obama.

I do not know for sure but I speculate that if you dug more deeply into the history, the reason that Barack Obama's talk page (i.e. the discussion page for the article rather than the article itself) is more heavily edited than the article is that Barack Obama (like George W. Bush) is nearly always semi-protected, meaning you have to have a slightly (but only slightly) mature account before you can edit it.

For a significant portion of George W. Bush's time as President, we did not have the ability to semi-protect articles.

The article for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama is also quite heavily edited, with 21,000 edits, versus 44, 000 for George W. Bush. (And he's been in office for one term, versus Bush's two terms.)

I think it unwise when people try to draw the conclusion that George W. Bush was super controversial (though he was) because his article was edited a lot, just as it would be unwise to conclude the same of Obama. US Presidents are likely always to get a lot of edits (in the news every day, etc.)

In terms of articles, then, we have this ranking for most edited biographies:

1. George W. Bush (President of the United States)
2. Michael Jackson (King of Pop)
3. Jesus (Son of God)
4. Britney Spears (God help us all)
5. Adolf Hitler (Dictator)
6. Barack Obama (President of the United States)

Wikipedia has policies in place and volunteers willing and eager to work with it that ensure that the biographies of ordinary people (and frequently ordinary companies, bands, events, pets, etc.) get removed from Wikipedia as fast as they are added.

Wikipedia’s main rule for what should be on Wikipedia is the General Notability Guidelines which basically works from the two directions you need as an Encyclopaedia. First there should be enough reliable information independent of what is being written about there to be able to create a Wikipedia page and second there should be a non-trivial chance of the target being run into in a context where they were relevant and without the person who found it being able to check primary sources so looking them up in an encyclopaedia would be the smart thing to do.

Your average random person writing about themselve does not meet this notability threshold and neither do their pets, their bands, etc. And your average random person writing about themselves doesn’t know how to start to write an article that passes the Notability standards (indeed they normally won’t link any source).

Whenever someone makes a new page it shows up on Wikipedia’s Recent Changes, which can be found in the sidebar, where there are enough volunteers watching at any given time that it will almost certainly be spotted. (There is some organisation here through the new pages patrol). Whenever someone spots a blatant page Speedy Deletion: A7 (just by adding {{a7}} to the top of the page) which is for articles with “No indication of importance (people, animals, organizations, web content, events)”. These are, of course, the things that are normally put up for publicity or vanity and where people don’t know enough to even start engaging with the Wikipedia guidelines; there are other speedy deletion criteria like blatant nonsense, hoaxes, and copyright violations. This then flags it for one of Wikipedia’s admins to look it over and if the admin agrees (as they normally do - it’s pretty obvious in most cases) the page is gone.

As many of us who are likely to be looking at the new pages have tools like Twinkle installed to mark pages for speedy deletion (and leave welcome messages and a few other things) it takes only a couple of seconds to mark a page for deletion after reading it - and deleting a marked page is not only fast for the admin, it can be done at leisure (and it will be flagged if the A7 is just deleted of course). And there are a lot more Wikipedia volunteers than there are people trying to add their own page at any given time.

A few do slip through the net and are caught later by editors who either use the normal A7 or the articles for deletion process. There are some that are well enough written and present a good enough case for notability that they remain, but this isn’t a flood. There are also some that haven’t been caught - but almost all of these haven’t been caught because they have no incoming links so no one finds them and they don’t cause much harm.

Far too many do, yes. Most of those articles get deleted (though no one keeps track), because most people who write their biographies either are unaware of Wikipedia's policy as to whether there should be an article about a person, or chose to ignore it.

There is a separate policy regarding autobiographies. That can be summarized as "Don't write about yourself, even if you're just changing an existing article". Even if a person is entitled to a Wikipedia biography, Wikipedia's policy is "If your life and achievements are verifiable and genuinely notable, someone else will probably create an article about you sooner or later."

About a quarter of new Wikipedia editors start by creating a new article - the other three quarters almost all start by changing existing articles.

Most new articles read like they are written by someone who has such a conflict of interest that they shouldn’t be writing that article as they can’t write it neutrally. But these aren’t just bios, many are organisations or products. Judging from the comments and the account names it isn’t just people writing about themselves and or the band they are putting together, they also write about their bosses, their employers and their employers products. Or they write about people and things of which they are fans, often it is hard to tell the two types of editor apart.

The true scale of such articles isn’t particularly obvious unless you watch the carnage at New Page Patrol. Every day hundreds of new articles are created and deleted within hours, sometimes minutes.

So yes, many people make the mistake of creating an article about themselves on Wikipedia, but most don’t.

Fame is a pretty wide topic, and there are levels from locally known through well-known to famous or celebrity.

In my experience there are a few types:

• The ones familar with Wikipedia usually do not edit their own articles but either ask fellow editors to do it or put info on the talk page, and let others use it or not; non-significant edits are okay and they’re regularly done.
• The opposite is the type which is not familar with Wikipedia (and the internet content creation and crowd work) at all. The ones who are famous but not overly rich and very busy often try to contact Wikipedia by email or phone and try to find someone to send their data to get it into Wikipedia. The other half pays someone to do it, or more often there are already people who work with their PR.
• A few “notable” people try to edit Wikipedia by themselves while being unfamiliar with the process, and they usually get very unfriendly and harsh responses and they leave; this effect is even stronger when someone over-estimates his/her own importance.
• There are few very-well-known people who make edits under not associated pseudonyms, and sometimes have hard time when editors request the source. There were some cases when the person wrote to the internal permission checking email to confirm [OTRS] but requested to stay anonymous.

But, generally, editing your own articles [or the companies you are related to] is advised against.

If Wikipedia is publicly editable, why isn't it flooded with biographies of ordinary people writing about themselves?

Wikipedia is flooded with biographies of ordinary people writing about themselves, just volunteers review new articles, flag ones that don’t meet the inclusion criteria, and then volunteer administrators like me delete those biographies.

Wikipedia’s “notability” inclusion criteria require that multiple reliable sources have written about a subject in-depth, which excludes most “ordinary people”.

The most common way for an article about an ordinary person to be deleted is article speedy deletion criterion number 7, “A7”, which applies when an article doesn’t even assert the importance of its subject (with importance implicitly asserted by providing sources).

People's writing or editing their own Wikipedia biographies is frowned upon, but not forbidden (see Wikipedia:Autobiography).

In practice, however, an enormous number of people have started Wikipedia pages on themselves, or edited pages related to themselves, often using some pseudonym.

Sometimes this is quite understandable, as there have been many cases of Wikipedia hosting defamatory material that no one but the biography subject cared about cleaning up.

Here is an example brought up by James O'Brien in a BBC Newsnight interview with Jimmy Wales (skip to time code 2:53):

His biography contained malicious slurs that nobody cleaned up, until his wife accidentally spotted them.

Or see Wikipedia: re-writing history for an example where a man was defamed over years and years on Wikipedia. I think you would agree that if Joe Streater had gone to Wikipedia and taken his name out of the article concerned, he would have been fully within his rights, because no one else did.

Of course, the situation is similar with businesses. In my experience, almost any Wikipedia article on a small or mid-sized business will have seen edits that could reasonably be assumed to have been made by principals, employees or agents of that business (see Wiki-paid-y a? - The Times of India, Indian Fakers Teach Wiki PR, Wikipedia’s Friends With Benefits, Obvious paid editors are obvious, The battle to destroy Wikipedia's biggest sockpuppet army). Sometimes those edits are absolutely legitimate – you get disgruntled employees editing articles on the business that sacked them, and so on – and sometimes it is egregious PR puffery.

It is very important to look closely at what an account has done, and how an article looked before and after their edits. The headline "Company deletes criticism about itself on Wikipedia" always looks bad, but I have to say that I have seen cases where the company was in the right, according to Wikipedia's own policies, because someone had written a hatchet job rather than an encyclopedic article about them. Journalists have a duty of care here to ensure that they do not give Wikipedia a free pass – sometimes it really is the case that Wikipedia was at fault!

In many other cases, of course, you get people just trying to make their company look good, in effect trying to write a PR brochure on Wikipedia, and such efforts are rightly condemned.

Given that the Wikipedia community fiercely protects the anonymity of its contributors, it's often very difficult to prove that a particular editor is writing about himself, or a company they work for, or is writing about you because you have been in some sort of conflict with them.

As soon as you say on Wikipedia that you think you know who a Wikipedia editor is – either because they seem to be massaging their own entry in Wikipedia, or because they are adding a lot of unflattering material to your biography – you are very likely to be banned for "outing" a Wikipedian (see Wikipedia:Harassment), which means that you are blocked from contributing to Wikipedia, and the person in question is allowed to carry on doing what they were doing.

For some good examples of malicious Wikipedia editing ("revenge editing"), see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose.

So, in practice, it is very messy, and results may vary from page to page. I know pages in Wikipedia that are little more than hagiographies, and I have seen pages that were malicious hatchet jobs that caused real damage and enormous pain to the maligned individual.

"So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. “I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.” The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from “people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that.”"

Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Yes, that’s me. A few days ago I bicycled through Newark, New Jersey, snapping photos of buildings that are mentioned in Wikipedia but had no photos. This was on my way to Rutgers University to help a class in writing Wikipedia articles. As it turned out, they mostly needed help in setting up helpful links among articles. This work does not contribute anything original but when the links are well done, they help readers understand a topic better.

Originality is often a good thing in the world, but tends to be overrated as relative to the important Wikipedia work of ensuring accuracy, neutrality, and readability. Usually when I’m teaching new editors, they assume we don’t have enough articles. They want add something new. I help them steer clear of making it original research while adding new material, but I also show them how to improve the articles that already exist.

While coaching on this particular day we encountered some really bad prose in articles about a small town in Mexico and a revolution in the 1820s in Guaquil. I didn’t show my students how to track down the authors and their methods; we didn’t have enough time for them to learn the wonderful powers of that process. We merely assumed that someone had done AI translations of the original Spanish Wikipedia articles, which were badly written in the first place. Our Spanish was not good enough to let us polish the original prose, but we managed to produce modestly readable English prose and to identify and delete some dubious claims or frivolous details.

Improving the biography of a medical bureaucrat in the 1870s led to some interesting things; we got into a very unclear description of the Republican Party nominating convention for Governor of New Jersey. My familiarity with the partisan politics of that age helped us to straighten that out well enough, deleting bits that we just didn’t have time to understand. Also changed some misleading pagelinks to more relevant ones.

This would not have gone so well, had this not been in a classroom full of seasoned professors, librarians and other academic people who are better than me at tracking down appropriate sources. Teamwork is what makes Wikipedia work; I had the Wikitech and Wikipolitics understanding we needed; others knew how to do other parts of the job.

So no, originality was not what it was about on that day, and originality is not what Wikipedia is about in general. Our millions of articles already have a great amount of originality that’s worthless in an encyclopedia and should be either rescued or deleted. I’ll be coaching again a week from now in Philadelphia.

Only 6% of Wikipedia Readers Have Ever Edited Wikipedia Content

About 19% of readers are not aware about the fact that they could edit Wikipedia.

Reasons for not editing Wikipedia:

via http://thetecnica.com/2012/01/only-6-of-wikipedia-readers-have-ever.html

That's hard to say because Wikipedia does not require logins to edit. While IP addresses are recorded for such edits, they do not cleanly map to individual users.

So, what can we know about registered users?

First of all, a caveat: for the following stats I'm going to assume one account = one user, which is wrong. Some users have multiple accounts (which is sometimes against policy), some users share accounts (against policy), and some users aren't even people (they are bots that fix various things automatically). Also, the edit count is heavily weighted towards bots, so one can't assume an "average" number of edits by looking at the total number of edits and users.

1,136,849 unique registered accounts have made at least 10 edits.[1]
The current world population is 6.92 billion[2]. So, that gives 0.016% of the world's population, but also excludes a lot of users who made fewer than 10 edits.

Another way to count is to look at the total number of registered accounts (14,552,485) and guess how many of those are editors.[3] A survey of Wikipedians suggested that 23.5% of registered users have made at least one edit.[4] So, that suggests the number is around 0.05% of the world's population or about 3.4 million accounts. There are some reasons to believe that this study inflates the number of users who actually make edits, as the relatively young Russian Wikipedia was overrepresented.

Although I work there I want to stress I don't collect stats for Wikipedia and as you can see these numbers are extremely messy and totally unofficial. But my gut feeling is that the lower number is closer to the truth. So maybe it's something like 0.02% of the world's population. Note: that's 0.02 of 1%.

1. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm
2. http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_statistics
4. http://www.wikipediastudy.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf

Nobody has “their own Wikipedia page”. There are articles in Wikipedia about people, generally because they have done or been something notable, and occasionally because they have been killed in a particularly gruesome way (and then the article is usually about the murder, more than the victim). You end up with a Wikipedia article about you by having attention drawn to you in some way: winning public office, becoming a member of a sports team at the upper-most levels of your notable sport, having considerable intellectual achievements as a professor or other scholar, achieving particularly high rank in your nation’s civil or military service, etc. If this happens, the article about you will mention things you would rather see forgotten, not just the things you want people to know about.

(Somebody tried to write a Wikipedia article about me once; it was nominated for deletion within eight minutes of creation, and the consensus was that I was not notable enough to merit an article in a global encyclopedia. I openly participated in that discussion, and was one of those who argued “the guy is too obscure”.)

As you can see,

I do all, or almost all, the edits to my English Wikipedia page. It is essentially my autobiography as a Wikipedia editor. Probably it would be better if other editors made some adjustments, but editing a fellow editor’s own page can make complications. I also have a page in Wikimedia Commons.

Fortunately, I have been able to avoid becoming notable enough to be made the subject of a Wikipedia article. That would be out of my control. Someone who sees news stories about me (mostly, as Wikiphotographer) might think the danger is near, but no, I think I’m pretty well protected.

“Earn” sets the wrong tone here, I think. Wikipedia articles aren’t rewards. There are many awesome people who do not (and should not) have articles about them, and many horrible people who do and should. It’s not a comment on someone’s character.

The question we ask is whether we have enough reliable and independent source material available to make a relatively complete and neutral article about a subject. If the reference material exists, great, we can create the article. If not, we can’t.

What we do and don’t have articles on isn’t a question of subjective judgment, that such and such a thing “should” have an article about it, or “deserves” to. It’s really just a question of whether we can write the article to start with. Source availability is what determines that.

I’ve seen it done several times in English Wikipedia. For example, some of my students have started a new article in a Sandbox and gradually built it up with the help of friends before getting it published into Main Space as an article by a user with a bit more experience. For example, an instructor like me. For changes to existing articles, it was never commonplace and I haven’t seen it done in years.

There is a feature called “Flagged revisions” by which most editors are not authorized to publish a revision instantly as in English Wikipedia. Certain “Trusted Users” have to approve those changes. German Wikipedia is, far as I know, is the biggest Wikipedia to do that as standard operating procedure. English Wikipedia does it for a very few articles.

As of December 2013, 4,819,424 registered editors have made at least one edit in the article namespace of English Wikipedia. The latest number of registered users who have made one or more edits to any namespace (including articles, discussion pages, policy pages etc.) is 6,941, 236 per Quora User's answer to How many people have made at least one edit on English Wikipedia?. Like Tom mentions, this would include multiple accounts by the same user, bot accounts etc. In addition to registered users, "114,675,678 article edits were made by anonymous users, out of a total of 386,434,900 article edits (30%)." We do not have detailed numbers for English Wikipedia about anonymous users. For this and similar data, check Wikipedia Statistics.
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I don’t keep up on the statistics, but there are relatively few who edit the English Wikipedia, given the number of articles. Much of the routine maintenance is done by automation, not human editors. There are human editors concerned with adding content to incomplete articles, and others who essentially “author” articles by accounting for 70% or more of the text. I am one of these, but I am not a “Wikipedian”. I am retired, and enjoy writing as a way of organizing things that I have learned (and continue to learn) in more than fifty years of being an adult. This is the same reason I answer questions on Quora.

I have a background in both cognitive psychology and information technology, so I do not believe in the basic premise of Wikipedia, that the sum of human knowledge can be compiled by anonymous editors within the framework of a few basic rules. What I see instead is a vast number of articles with almost no content, and a smaller percentage of articles worth reading because they are in fact authored by subject area experts such as myself. In between, there are the crowdsourced articles with many editors, which tend toward mediocrity and remain there. In the real world, the “wisdom of crowds” occurs only in certain conditions, which Wikipedia does not provide. Most of all, there really are no crowds.

Yes, people employed by large companies often edit Wikipedia articles about their organisations. It is a clear conflict of interest, but it happens, often obscured because editors can remain anonymous.

However, in my experience, it is often easy to spot the corporate contributions (text cut and pasted from the company website, negative content deleted, 'marketing-speak', reverent mentions of senior managers, etc).

If such editing is detected, it can have a negative impact on the organisation concerned and on the consultants it employed to edit the article. For example, PR consultancy Bell Pottinger was discovered to be editing articles related to one of its clients, and the Bell Pottinger article now mentions its contravention of Wikipedia guidelines. And there is a whole article about Church of Scientology editing on Wikipedia.

Such incidents have helped alert other organisations to be more ethical in their approach. For example, it is acceptable for company representatives to use an article's Talk page to alert non-conflicted editors about errors or omissions in an article and to suggest relevant non-company sources.

This can sometimes have unintended consequences as an editor will, quite rightly, judge the sources on their merit, and may also do further searches for information about the company. I once made some minor edits to a company article and then noticed it had been involved in a past pension fund scandal. As this was not mentioned in the article, I added a section - Wikipedia neutral Point of View encourages editors to represent all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a subject - and the article is a little more complete as a result, but maybe not as positive as the company would have liked.

I'm sure a lot of companies do edit their own articles, or try. How successful they are is another matter. Wikipedia has lots of defense mechanisms to prevent improper editing, though they tend not to work as well for lesser-read articles.

You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia article about Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement, which has a lot of PR folks who are concerned about this issue. (Companies often hire PR firms to help with reputational issues.)

From 2007 to 2013, WikiScanner could be used on a case-by-case basis to check for some of this type of editing. For example, see this Techdirt article: Diebold, Disney, Many Others Caught Editing Wikipedia Entries In Their Favor. But I'm not aware of any systematic studies that resulted.

WikiWatchdog now offers a similar service. For example, IP addresses from the Koch Industries, Inc. domain have done 8 edits to the article "Charles Koch".

Yes, but only if they are editing separate sections.

Each section of a Wikipedia article has it's own edit button, and if you want to avoid edit conflicts, my best advice is to edit one section at a time (and save frequently,especially when editing a topical article).

The most active page I have been involved in on Wikipedia was the article on Sarah Palin on the night that John McCain announced her as his Presidential running mate. Editing peaked at 25 edits per minute with multiple sections being involved in edit wars before the article was protected. There would have been a lot of people editing that article that day, and I dread to think how many edits were lost to edit conflicts.

Of course with over six million articles and around 200,000 edits per day, the average Wikipedia article gets edited once a month and the vast majority less often. So if you are updating obscure articles that may not have changed in years, you can do hundreds of edits without experiencing an edit conflict. But if there is anything topical about the article you are editing, I would suggest getting into the habit of clicking the edit button next to the section header rather than the one at the top of the page.