After several days of press reports saying Wikipedia was loosing large amounts of editors, co-founder, Jimmy Wales, says his statistics don’t confirm the research of Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.
Mr. Wales told The Telegraph:
“Our internal numbers don’t confirm all the claims made. We do agree that the number of editors has stabilised, as one would expect, since we’re already the fifth most popular website on the internet…[however] our own data shows that the number of active editors across all projects is stable – i.e. the new editors are replaced at about the same pace as existing editors are leaving.”
Mr Wales was keen to stress the numbers had stabilized because Wikipedia was so large. “You can’t keep growing forever, there are only so many people on the internet,” he explained.
[Snip]
The site came under fire recently when it announced new measures which would enable a core group of volunteer editors to adjudicate on any changes made to a living person’s Wikipedia before those modifications were published.
…new measures, known as “flagged revisions”, which are set to be adopted in December, were designed to combat the growing problem of vandalism on the site.
[Snip]
Mr Wales denied there had been any “material changes” to the editing rules, and in an interview with The Telegraph last week dismissed the concerns that the web encyclopaedia has changed its ethos…People used to have to register to make these sort of changes to high profile Wikipedia pages and then wait a few days. Now they can upload the changes without registering and wait to see if they are uploaded.”
In our ResourceShelf post from November 23rd we include:
+ A WSJ article about the research (many others since then).
+ Links to research from the PARC Laboratory from August 11, 2009 including a New Scientist article asking if Wikipedia is heading for bust.
+ Comments about “core” Wikipedias from Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner.
+ A link to a story from Summer 2009 about how Wikipedia was trying to reach new contributors, from various groups.
+ ResourceShelf comments (we wonder out loud) from a 2006 post about the future of the project.
Source: The Telegraph, Wikipedia Blog
Hat Tip: OANet
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