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Reports of Wikipedia's demise, prescriptions for its ills, and more

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By Rje and Sage Ross

Wikipedia in decline?

This week brought a wave of media attention sparked by the November 23 Wall Street Journal story "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" (see previous Signpost coverage) as well as responses from Erik Moeller and Erik Zachte on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, "Wikipedia's Volunteer Story". Moeller and Zachte note that "The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then."

The BBC picked up the story with "Wikipedia 'loses' 49,000 editors" and extended coverage in the dot.life blog with the post "Wikipedia on the wane?" by Rory Cellan-Jones. The blog features comments "gathered [Wednesday] morning from some 'Wikipedians'" explaining why they had stopped editing, and both the story and blog post include reactions from Mike Peel (User:Mike Peel), chair of Wikimedia UK. The blog also has a boisterous comments section. The BBC also covered the Wikimedia Foundation reaction, reporting that "Wikipedia denies mass exodus of editors".

BBC News Channel interviewed Wikipedian Charles Matthews (User:Charles Matthews) on Wednesday as well; Matthews has provided a transcript of the conversation.

In response to the wave of coverage, the New York Times vocabulary blog Schott's Vocab featured the word "Deletionists" on Thursday.

The discussion was also picked up on Slashdot (with over 600 comments), and again (with over 200 comments) after the WMF blog post.

Other coverage includes:

Morozov opines

Journalist Evgeny Morozov, who surveyed recent research and perspectives on Wikipedia in a review of The Wikipedia Revolution (noted previously), wrote a pair of columns on Wikipedia this week: "Free Speech and the Internet", in the New York Times; and "The serious gap in Wikipedia’s knowledge: The online encyclopedia is bloated with trivia and needs more meat" in The Sunday Times. (Morozov noted on Twitter that the headlines and subheadlines were not his choice.)

In the New York Times piece, Morozov focuses on the case of Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, in which German Wikipedia chose to follow German law by redacting the names of convicted murderers who had completed their sentences, but English Wikipedia, after extensive discussion, decided to use their full names. Wolfgang Werlé's lawyers recently sent the Wikimedia Foundation a cease and desist letter, and previously won a default judgment against Wikimedia in a German court. According to Morozov,

The German case illustrates that some of the disputes could be too complex to be easily pigeon-holed into an intractable body of Wikipedia’s rules and practices.

He proposes that

whenever current rules and norms of the project come into conflict, Wikipedians shouldn’t shun away from asking for help. An external international panel comprising the world’s most eminent philosophers, legal scholars, historians and others can prevent challenging cases from getting ugly before they reach the courts.

The piece drew the ire of Jimmy Wales in a discussion on his talk page, particularly because of Morozov's negative characterization of Wikipedians and their decision-making processes.

In The Sunday Times piece, Morozov praises Wikipedia for its successes but criticizes the project for its lack of perspective on the relative importance of different topics. He argues that

Wikipedians have to find a way formally to enshrine the concept of “importance” into their editing practices. This doesn’t mean that entries about the disputed anatomy of Rasputin’s penis, or the memorial to a reputed UFO in Sweden, or the cultural history of the Richard Nixon mask, have to go: whoever wants can continue editing them — they should just be made aware that these aren’t areas that need the most attention.

Briefly


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In this issue
30 November 2009 (all comments)
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    The media just wants to show us in bad light. But, so far there has been one exception and that was DNA which portayed us as warriors... [2] --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 14:45, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. I agree with those who say that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Most people don't have the inclination or skills to do real research and add high-quality content to the encyclopedia. I think it's a good thing that the current contributors are those who can and do. -- Ssilvers (talk) 16:07, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • To comment about a different subject above, we've tried for years to alert contributors that there are subjects which deserve more attention than others; that is one of the reasons why articles are rated for importance. However, volunteers will continue to work on the subjects that they are interested in; that is why there are Featured Articles on Pokemon-related topics, to mention an old canard, while many important articles remain a mess. Maybe the community ought to explore ways to either encourage or make it easier to improve important articles. -- llywrch (talk) 16:46, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • People write about what interests them. Wikipedia reflects in a way what a section of humanity considers important. Difficult to get around this other than attracting more academics to the project, maybe partnering with Universities? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:17, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • True, but there are a lot of people who are willing to help out where needed. I think we could do a much better job of steering those people to the more important article areas. Right now, if you come to browse the to do list, you are presented with a cacophony of choices that do not do much, qualitatively, to indicate the areas of greatest need. -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:03, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    For some insight on why Wikipedians leave the project, see Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians.
    For some ideas for new articles, see Wikipedia:Requested articles. -- Wavelength (talk) 20:37, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    • Beyond the low-hanging article fruit thing, there's the simple matter of how a system grows over which at least the WSJ article made somewhat of a deal out of if I recall correctly. Of course Wikipedia's membership rose rapidly in its first couple years, you are starting at zero. In some ways it's a matter of low-hanging membership fruit. There is, to some degree, an upper limit on the total possible number of Wikipedia members (the Earth's population minus those permabanned) and then a more realistic upper limit (of those with internet access who are interested in and capable of working on the project). When you start at zero you can feast upon that group, but once you've recruited a great many of them there's fewer easy new members to attract. Staxringold talkcontribs 23:33, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • I find it a little disturbing to suggest that people are leaving because most of the articles have been created. If one checks the Wikipedia:WikiProject_Australia/To-do list, one might notice a lot of work still needs to be done, especially when the list is no-where near complete. - Shiftchange (talk) 12:47, 3 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    Right. If you think you will be the first person to write an article about kangaroos, you will find, when you come here, that there is already an article on kangaroos. To improve the article further, we now need some serious research, and many potential contributors just want to write about something off the top of their heads. So, it is not surprising that those contributors will be less likely to edit, now that the obvious topics already have "off the top of my head" information. But, as I said above, I don't think that's a problem. -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:58, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    With a project of this nature there will always be a levelling off of new recruits, people updating 'their pet topics' and then doing minimal work, and temporary increases and decreases in active users (statistical link anyone?).

    What might be more interesting is the 'number of editors of #all# wikis', what overlaps there are between them, and what proportion of persons have transferred 'some, much or all' of their wiki-ing activity to other wikis. Jackiespeel (talk) 14:43, 4 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    Wikipedia:Statistics has a link to Wikipedia Statistics - Site map. -- Wavelength (talk) 20:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    Falloff in number of editors can be accounted for fairly easily. When individuals see that the articles they are interested in enough to come to wikipedia are already in what is to them an acceptable condition, or at a point where further improvements might involve more work than they are willing or able to put out, their motivation for editing declines. Particularly considering the number of people we have who are, to some degree, motivated by pop culture content, it makes perfect sense to me that once that content has gotten to a good quality, the people who are interested in it will have less content to keep themselves occupied with and start to taper off. I do myself think highly of the current Donut Drive and Bacon Challenge contests as quick, comparatively nonbinding ways of addressing these questions, and hope that such short collaborations take on. That doesn't really help us address the comparative weakness of some of the real encyclopedic content, but it's good for what it is. John Carter (talk) 16:21, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    What's all this talk of "the media is always negative"? That's not what I see. I also don't see the falloff in editors as a huge problem, at least not for biology-related matters. The supposed move of people who want to make biased articles on politics is great news, if it is real. There are still new editors: including myself. I started this account in October, after editing as an IP for some time. I've also seen a number of people join up already.—innotata (Talk • Contribs) 20:40, 7 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    There will always be some turnover of editors 'for all sorts of reasons' (including 'forgot previous name and password, restart under new name' and 'surge following WP mentions in the news'). Would there be any way of measuring the statistics of 'overlap with and transfer to other Wikis'?

    On KangarooWiki, would one 'hop' to another page? Jackiespeel (talk) 16:48, 9 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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