Thousands of online volunteers are quitting Wikipedia, reports the Wall Street Journal.
However, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' top priority is to improve the accuracy of the articles in his encyclopaedia, it adds.
Hopefully, for online users like me, Wikipedia seems too big to fail. It has more than three million active contributors in 10 languages, says the Journal.
Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.
That could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet — the empowerment of the amateur.
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.
Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix.
As it matures, Wikipedia is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledges participation has been declining. But he says it still isn't clear to him what the "right" number of volunteer "Wikipedians" should be. "If people think Wikipedia is done," he says, meaning that with three million articles it is hard to find new things to write about, "that's substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."
Mr. Wales says his top priority is to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia's articles. He's pushing a new feature that would require top editors to approve all edits before they are displayed on the site. The idea is to prevent the kind of vandalism that in January declared Sen. Edward Kennedy's death months before his actual passing.
Update: Gregory commented that Wales was not the founder but one of the two primary co-founders of Wikipedia with Larry Sanger.
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Too bad, Jimmy Wales is not “the founder” of Wikipedia. He was one of two primary co-founders…with Larry Sanger and it is even thoroughly referenced in the Wikipedia articles about Wales and Sanger….
Thank you for the information, Gregory.