Crowdsourced content spans encyclopedia articles, software repositories, developer answers, videos, posts and messages. The statistics below show how participation, review, discovery and moderation operate at very different scales across Wikipedia, GitHub, Stack Overflow, YouTube and Reddit.
Contents
- Wikipedia: scale and editorial effort
- Open-source contributions on GitHub
- Developer knowledge and participation
- Video and user-created audiences
- Reddit content creation and moderation
- Reddit activity and platform economics
Wikipedia: scale and editorial effort
The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024–2025 Annual Report describes Wikipedia as a large multilingual knowledge project with 66 million articles. That total gives a sense of the accumulated output, but article count alone does not describe editorial quality or the work needed to develop individual pages.
Language coverage can be especially important for communities whose information needs are not fully represented in the largest language editions. Dagbani Wikipedia had more than 12,000 articles in the same report. Dagbani is spoken by about 3 million native speakers, giving the project’s article count a clear linguistic and community context. These are figures from the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024–2025 Annual Report; the report’s measurement period should be kept distinct from later platform activity.
The report also provides a detailed example through the ALS article. The article existed in 75 languages and had been built through more than 6,200 edits. It reached Good Article status in 2025. This example links three different measures of crowdsourced work: multilingual availability, revision volume and a quality milestone.
Good Article status is selective rather than routine. At the time described in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024–2025 Annual Report, only 0.59% of English Wikipedia’s 6,946,867 articles were categorized as Good. The percentage and article base are therefore a snapshot of English Wikipedia at that time, not a universal rate for every language edition or every period.
The previous Wikimedia Foundation 2023–2024 Annual Report supplies a separate activity snapshot. Wikipedia recorded 5.7 edits per second, received more than 15 billion views a month and had more than 60 million articles. Wikimedia projects were edited by over 275,000 editors every month around the world. The report also recorded 8 million donors from over 200 countries and 191 affiliates worldwide.
| Wikimedia measure | Reported figure | Measurement context |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia articles | 66 million | 2024–2025 annual report |
| Wikipedia edits | 5.7 per second | 2023–2024 annual report |
| Monthly Wikimedia editors | Over 275,000 | 2023–2024 annual report |
| Monthly Wikipedia views | Over 15 billion | 2023–2024 annual report |
| Wikimedia donors | 8 million | From over 200 countries, 2023–2024 report |
| Wikimedia affiliates | 191 | Worldwide, 2023–2024 report |
The annual reports repeat some activity measures as highlighted core metrics. They should not be added together: the 5.7-edits-per-second figure, the monthly editor count, the donor count and the affiliate count describe different dimensions of the Wikimedia ecosystem.
Open-source contributions on GitHub
GitHub’s Octoverse 2024 shows crowdsourced content in a software-development setting. Developers made nearly 1 billion contributions to open-source and public repositories in 2024, while GitHub recorded 5.2 billion contributions to all projects on the platform. GitHub also added 108 million new repositories during 2024, and 1.4 million new developers globally joined open source.
These totals cover different scopes. The nearly 1 billion figure is for open-source and public repositories, whereas 5.2 billion covers all projects on GitHub. The 108 million figure counts repositories added, and the 1.4 million figure counts developers joining open source. Treating them as interchangeable would obscure how contribution, project creation and participant growth differ.
GitHub reported several technology-specific indicators in the same 2024 Octoverse. JavaScript package consumption through npm rose 15% year over year. The platform also reported 70,000 new public and open-source generative AI projects created in 2024. Contributions to all generative AI projects grew almost 60%, and the total number of generative AI projects reached nearly 150,000 after growing 98% year over year.
Jupyter Notebook usage provides another measure of collaborative technical content. GitHub said usage had spiked more than 170% since 2022 and increased 92% since the prior year. Jupyter Notebook usage had grown to more than 1.5 million repositories since 2016. These are growth measures with different comparison periods, so the 170%, 92% and 1.5-million figures describe separate baselines rather than one combined trend.
First-time contributor activity also had identifiable destinations. GitHub’s top ten open-source and public projects attracting the most first-time contributors in 2024 were, in order: microsoft/vscode, home-assistant/core, microsoft/PowerToys, Kas-tle/java2bedrock.sh, ultralytics/ultralytics, flutter/flutter, langchain-ai/langchain, Ultimaker/Cura, platformio/platformio-home and Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt. The ranking identifies project names and positions; the supplied report does not provide contributor counts for each rank.
Developer knowledge and participation
GitHub’s Open Source Survey 2024 adds information about how contributors think about security, tools and representation. Secure by design was considered important by 82% of open-source survey respondents when using an open-source project, while 65% prioritized secure by design when contributing.
AI tools were used for coding or documentation by 73% of respondents. The same survey said 30% of respondents classified themselves as minorities. That was described as a nine-percentage-point increase from the prior survey and as a 43% increase since the last survey. The percentage-point change and the relative increase are distinct ways of describing the reported change.
Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey shows how crowdsourced technical knowledge connects with learning and software work. A reported 83% of developers said they learn to code using online resources, compared with 49% who said they learn in school. Another survey summary reported 82% using online resources compared with 49% in school. Because these figures come from the survey’s reported summaries, they are retained as separate published measures rather than recalculated.
Technical documentation remains a major part of that information ecosystem. Eighty-four percent of developers used technical documentation when they were not using Stack Overflow, and 90% of those documentation users relied on API and SDK package documentation. Eleven percent of respondents identified as learning to code or as students, 17.3% were going to school at least part-time, and 83% had some level of post-secondary education.
The survey also reported that JavaScript was used by 62% of respondents, HTML/CSS by 53% and Python by 51%. Role distribution included 31% full-stack engineers and 17% back-end engineers. On AI, 76% were currently using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, 72% were favorable or very favorable toward AI tools for development, 43% felt good about AI accuracy and 31% were skeptical about AI accuracy. Seventy percent of professional developers did not perceive AI as a threat to their job.
Video and user-created audiences
YouTube’s Analytics for Artists announcement describes a crowdsourced video ecosystem with a global logged-in audience. YouTube said it had over 2 billion monthly logged-in users in over 100 countries. The geography is explicit in the platform description, while the user total is a monthly measure.
User-created videos also contribute materially to music discovery. Among the top 1,000 artists, over 20% of chart-eligible views came from videos created by users. This measure applies to that top-1,000-artist group and to chart-eligible views; it should not be generalized to every artist, every video view or all YouTube activity.
Together, the two figures show different sides of crowdsourced content. The audience statistic measures potential monthly reach across countries. The artist statistic measures the share of a specific class of views associated with user-created videos. Neither figure establishes how many individual creators produced those videos.
Reddit content creation and moderation
Reddit’s Transparency Report for January–June 2024 reported over 5.3 billion pieces of content shared across the platform. Redditors created 1,898,733,057 posts and comments in that half-year, up 5.6% versus the second half of 2023. They also sent 492,936,835 private messages, up 25.4% versus the prior half-year.
Moderation figures show the scale of review alongside creation. Reddit reported that 3.1% of total content created in the first half of 2024 was removed across all content types. Moderators removed 1.6%, while admins removed 1.5%. Moderators initiated 40.7% of all content removals, and 71.9% of moderator removals were proactive Automod removals.
Reddit said moderators and admins removed 162,135,309 pieces of content in the first half of 2024. Users submitted 16,189,689 reports, and Reddit took removal action on 11% of those reports. Private-message removals for Content Policy violations totaled 7,854,199, up 198.5% versus the second half of 2023.
Legal requests were reported separately. The highest-volume legal requesters in the first half of 2024 were the United States with 79 requests, the United Kingdom with 15 and Turkey with 12. Reddit removed 27% of content identified in those legal requests and took no action on 73%.
The July–December 2024 Transparency Report provides the next half-year snapshot. Reddit reported 158,960,445 pieces of content removed by moderators and admins. Proactive Automod removals represented 72.5% of moderator removals. Users submitted 16,070,307 reports, while admins took action on 9.3% of user reports. Redditors created 2,032,304,294 posts and comments, up 7.0% versus the first half of 2024.
Reddit activity and platform economics
Reddit’s Q4 and FY 2024 Results reported 101.7 million daily active uniques in the fourth quarter of 2024. Q4 revenue reached $427.7 million, including $394.5 million in advertising revenue and $33.2 million in other revenue. Q4 gross margin was 92.6%.
For the full year 2024, Reddit reported $1.3 billion in revenue, including $1.2 billion in advertising revenue and $114.7 million in other revenue. Full-year gross margin was 90.5%. The company reported a full-year net loss of $484.3 million and adjusted EBITDA of $298.0 million.
These financial figures are company results for Reddit’s 2024 fiscal year, while the content and moderation measures above are transparency-report counts tied to specific half-years. Keeping those periods separate helps distinguish audience activity, content production, enforcement and financial performance when evaluating crowdsourced platforms.