Two friends of mine used to spend a few hours a week editing Wikipedia articles. In both cases, someup higher up on the totem pole started to remove their edit, claiming they were adding references to non-authoritative sites. The sites they included had some of the best articles on the subject matter, but the authors weren’t famous. As several rounds of edit wars, where they reversed the edits and this little Naxi would then undo their reversals, he threatened to suspend their accounts, which he apparently has the power to do. After reading the idiotic comments this fellow was making, and realizing there was little my friends could do (there is an appeals process, but it would be a waste of time), I decided I would never again edit an Wikipedia article, nor would I ever give them money.
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.
Wikipedia is extremely popular with the public, but not so much with the volunteers who run the site. They’re quitting, raising questions about the future of Wikipedia, says WSJ.com Senior Technology Editor Julia Angwin.
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.
