Fears are rising that Wikiepedia could be in trouble shortly as 49,000 volunteers have walked out this year. The free internet encyclopedia is one of the world’s most heavily used resources and it gets millions of hits a day.
The English language version of the site has suffered a huge lose of volunteer editors this year, according to a university study. The reason behind this is apparently based on the fact that there is an increased level of bureaucracy to help stop errors and misinformation.
The site gets around 325 million hits a month and has risen to the 5th most popular site in the world thanks to an addictive combination of huge data resources and user friendly interface. The research, by Felipe Ortega, at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, found that tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors were no longer contributing and they were not being replaced either.
Via Driver Heaven
Silly to say it could be the end, the content is still there.
Worth watching, related, TED talk:
“Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled “a ragtag band of volunteers,” gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished online encyclopedia. ”
http://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia.html
I reccomend.
I love wikipedia! Only really use it to look up random things, but i think it is brill – even if it can be edited by anyone
Well, that seems like a bad way to measure the life of wikipedia, but it is regardless an interesting data to be investigated. I would also love to know for sure, and maybe this info is already out there in wikipedia, how many vandalism (that were automatically fixed at least) they get every day. There are a lot of tools there to fight against it and all you need to know to is that no relevant data is lost because all history of revisions is kept safe guarded, and you can easily browse through the most relevant part of it.
Phillis, just a question: we can’t know if someone replied to our comment in here, can we?Phillis,
Considering it\’s not the most reliable resource on the planet it won\’t be a huge loss.
I don’t get why people get so upset over this. Volunteers walking out because their facts (only related to certain articles – specifically those relating to people who are still alive) have to be confirmed facts before they can post them online? Surely the accuracy of information in something like this is paramount, especially given its newfound reputation for reliability.
Not that silly! No volunteers means no misinformation checks, seriously jeopardising Wiki’s credibility.
Yes, the content is still there, but without editors to maintain it, how long before the content degenerates into a useless, inaccurate mess?
Not so silly.
Tom, the point of the article is that the information is more likely to not be accurate. Doesn’t everyone use Wiki to find out correct information, so if it is not correct then not a very useful tool.
And I’ve noticed that they are appealing for donations more than ever now. I never understood how it kept going in the first place.
It won’t be the “end” but, as a reliable online encyclopedia, Wikipedia is basically broken now. I used to edit the site and gave up because I thought its goal was impossible thanks to the sheer numbers of jokers, cranks and political ideologues who made it their business to ruin articles or use them to push their pet theories/worldviews. The wisdom of crowds only works with the uncontroversial – the sky is blue, the earth goes around the sun – as soon as things drift from that path Wikipedia becomes about as reliable as a bloke down the pub.
The site will continue, of course, but I wish it’d stop pretending it can be anything other than a good first reference source. Any serious study of a subject should be done via the old-fashioned route.
I’m not surprised so many volunteers quit. When I was still around on a daily basis, I spent more time fixing vandalism than I spent actually writing new content. All the misinformation can simply no longer be fixed by the amount of volunteers present.
The only reason the current buraucracy doesn’t work is because some people want to keep the radical open approach it uses now at all costs, even if it creates more work. Any bureaucracy applied later should help volunteers with an established track record to do their work without being hindered with petty rules.
No link? Are they calling anyone who contributes anything an editor?
If half the walkouts were spambots, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
Jimmy Wales is a horrid person who did a wonderful thing, or maybe he did a wonderful thing and then became a horrid person.
I only use Wikipedia now & then, but it would be a shame to see it go downhill……
LC x
Maybe their one-sided bias and blatant censorship on controversial issues has something to do with this. But then … maybe not. Maybe people have written what they wanted and walked out
Or are more concerned about their survival and don’t have so much free time now that we have this “economic crisis” …
“The English language version of the site has suffered a huge lose of volunteer editors(…)The reason behind this is apparently based on the fact that there is an increased level of bureaucracy to help stop errors and misinformation.”
Why? Surely it’s a good thing that they want to stop people adding rubbish or full-on lies to a site used for research by millions of people?
I’m not saying I agree with blanket censorship, but this is different. I’ve never fully trusted anything on Wikipedia, because it’s always been victim to pranksters making joke entries or even claiming people have died when they were in fact still alive.
I’d be suspicious of anyone who says they’d stop helping out on the site because of the need to “stop errors and misinformation”. It would make me wonder just what they intended to get up to on there.
Or could you take it as a call to action & start volunteering more frequently?
I gave up (and I was an administrator, probably still am) not because of the need to revert vandalism (one click in most cases), but because the whole thing had come to be dominated by sociopaths, and the byzantine rules made it nearly impossible to deal with them. (Yes, rules – for an organisation set up by a Libertarian and with a philosophy that the truth will emerge from freewheeling anarchy, it has a remarkably complex and badly-documented “legal” system). Articles on pseudoscience came to be dominated by true believers, and articles tended to reflect the persistence of nutters rather than established facts (not just pseudoscience – religion, politics, philosophy, the traditional counties of England, you name it). These days I’d only ever believe Wikipedia, as Matty says, as a first reference on uncontroversial subjects.