Number of speakers and participation

5% active Wikipedians (making more than 5 edits per month?) is way too much. Actually the country WP that are getting stable (EN, FR, DE, ...) will loose active wikipedians quite naturally and thats okay because most of what people want to put in wikipedia will be in (while of course there is a basic level of ever newly created knowledge so there will always be at least activity necessary). Apart from that the quality can be improved and thats a global challenge. I really don't think that white, male, educated, middle-upper class people are a problem for Wikipedia in any way. Not in the natural sciences, where I am contributing, where most of the things are objective and neutral anyway but also because WP is so transparent and aims for neutrality that it virtually doesn't matter who writes it down in the end. However it will matter in which language. English is not my native language, but I increasingly check the EN WP first, since it contains most information. With the ongoing dying-out of languages around the world, it could be that WP visitors of special languages might even decline while EN WP hits will go up. However, this means that the regional WPs are really valuable documents preserving languages and language-related knowledge. For everyday life it could be that EN WP's importance will even increase. Like I am a contributor to my regional WP and EN WP (and male and white.. :) ) basically providing all knowledge in both languages.

I think this conversation on targets for participation is really interesting. To re-hash some previous discussions on this topic, I'd point you to a graphic the Bridgespan team posted awhile back that engendered some controversy. [[1]]. We'd posted this graphic that shows what, to my mind, seemed like a really low rate of contribution from Wikipedia visitors - the ratio between visitors and contributors is less than .05% across all projects. What was controversial about this graphic was that folks didn't agree on the right target percentage - it is true, there is no way to know if .05% is fine, or if we should shoot for 1% or 10% for that matter. I think the second point on this graphic is really important, though, which is that for some projects there are very few total contributors. While I don't know how few are too few, it does make intuitive sense that you need some critical mass in order to protect a project from vandalism and build content.