Cuppacafe

What do you do when the people you rely on to keep you going start bailing out because, well, they are burnt out? Well, this is apparently what is happening to Wikipedia. We all know Wikipedia (it is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world) it has roughly 325 million visitors every month. However, an unprecedented number (in the millions) of their online volunteers (you know, the folks who write, edit and police the site) are, well, quitting.

As you can expect, This could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

The article in The Wall Street Journal went on to say:

Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

“Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment,” contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. “Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.”

To which I have to say...If Wiki goes, will anyone really notice?

Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At this year's meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of the demographic shifts.

“The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying,” said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on “smarter metrics” such as article quality.

He said he disagreed with dire views about the project's future. “I don’t expect to see Wikipedia follow the rule of any curve or any projection.”

The Perfessor

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 9:42 am and is filed under Net Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.