Note: If you go to the article on the WSJ site you only receive a snippet of this article. However, if you use Google you can access the complete article via Google’s “first click free” program. So, run this search and then click on the result. There is full text.

From the Article:

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.

[Snip]

“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.”

Comments:

+ The idea of Wikipedia loosing authors/editors is not a new topic. In fact, three months ago there were many articles and posts about research at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) on this very topic. Here’s a ResourceShelf post from August 11, 2009. The post is titled, “After the boom, is Wikipedia heading for bust?” and features an article from New Scientist. A blog loaded with stats and reports from the PARC researchers are available on this blog.

+ We’ve recently posted links to interviews with Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales and comments from Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Sue Gardner. While they doesn’t discuss the issues that this article brings up, they does discuss another problem, that many Wikipedians come from the same mold.

Gardner:
“The smart geeks are always going to be the heart and soul of what we do. But… the goal is to make the whole editing system more user-friendly so we’re not excluding the people who aren’t as tech-centric as our core community.”

Jimmy Wales:
1) This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site’s biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia’s pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous – or “a certain type of person”, in Wales’ words.

2) “Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy,” he says. “What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male – tragically 85 per cent male.

+ The article does mention the Wikipedia Academy that took place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Here’s a link to what we posted at that time.

+ Finally, ResourceShelf has wondered aloud for years what would happen if Wikipedians and others would leave the project and move on to some else. Here’s an example from June 17, 2006.

Specifically, here’s what we wrote in the June, 2006 post:

The bottom line for us about Wikipedia will not be coming today, tomorrow, or even next year, but in 4 or 5 years. Will volunteers stay with it? Will material be as closely watched as some of it is now? We remember another volunteer-based effort to help organize web sites, The Open Directory, and to put it mildly, DMOZ did not turn out to be what many had hoped for. It’s human nature. People are often ready to move on to the next big thing, especially when they volunteer. If that happens, will Wikipedia be able to maintain the more than one million (and by that time many many more) entries?

One thing we did not mention is the hostile environment that Felipe Ortega discusses.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Hat Tip: Library Stuff

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.