Wikipedia Loosing Contributors
Wikipedia’s relevancy may be affected after researchers discovered that thousands of encyclopedia contributors had abandoned the website.
According to a university study, 49,000 volunteer “editors” of the English-language version of Wikipedia have left the site in the first three months of 2009. By comparison, the previous year for the same period only saw 4,900 contributors deserting the site.
The mass desertion is believed to be caused by an upgrade of bureaucratic measures carried by the site’s management. According to them, it’s done so to prevent errors. A good example of such mistakes was the premature announcement of the death of Edward Kennedy, and the impression that the popular webbased encyclopedia is now part of the establishment.
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos researcher Felipe Ortega said that a lack of contributors could precipitate the end of the project, adding that Wikipedia is not at that point yet, but if the site continues on that run it could very well cease to exist.
Ortega said that the site has gone through some changes and that it’s very tightly controlled by others at the present moment. This makes it very difficult to simply jump in and contribute to articles.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001 and has evolved to being the world’s fifth most popular website with nearly 325 million visits every month.
Meanwhile, it was announced that Jimmy Wales was in Tampa Bay last week to launch tampabayhomess.wikia.com, a service which aims at helping the plight of homeless people. The new website creates a resource for government agencies, service providers, and advocates in order to share data about he homeless using the community model of Wikipedia.
Wales created Wikipedia in Florida 8 years ago but moved his operations to the San Francisco area.