Have you stopped editing Wikipedia? And if so, is it doomed?

I stopped posting articles or making edits in 2007. The senior editor who took a fancy to my article was working secretly for the Conservative Party and took me for a Liberal. It was tyranny.

He berated me so continuously it got on my nerves. A 13 word entry didn’t have notations. So I added them at his request. Not good enough, so I documented more climbing to 800 words with all the footnotes.

He moved the 13 word entry to a new page and demanded more proofs. Now the article had ballooned to 1,400 plus words.

Still he was not satisfied so I pulled the article. Reasonable requests are accommodated. Tyranny is not.

I write for myself now.

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Have you stopped editing Wikipedia? And if so, is it doomed?

By Jack Schofield Guardian.co.uk

Research shows that the number of Wikipedia editors is plunging at an alarming rate. Are you one of the drop-outs, and will it make any difference to Wikipedia’s future?

Wikipedia editors seem to be dropping like flies, according to research by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He analysed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages and found that “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,” reports The Wall Street Journal.

In 2006, the number of editors of the English language Wikipedia was growing by about 10,000 per month, but the number of editors has been declining since the end of 2007. Ortega’s figures suggest that in March this year, the number was declining by about 20,000 a month. You might expect it to level off, when it reaches the more hardcore participants, but clearly this rate of decline is unsustainable.

One reason for the decline might be that the “real” editors have not given up, they’re just not visiting the site as often. This is true in my (very very small) case. I spent some time getting a particular page going, but I probably didn’t even visit it in the first three months of this year, let alone edit it. Ortega will therefore have counted me as a “lost editor” but I don’t think I am.

It’s a fact of life that page creation is much more intensive than curation. So much of Wikipedia is now, relatively speaking, “finished” that you’d expect the number of real edits to decline.

There are other factors, of course, including vandalism, and the perceived hostility of some Wikipedia admins, aka “the deletionists”. There is bound to be some level of conflict between the people who think that the aim is to create interesting entries and that there’s no limit to Wikipedia’s coverage, and the ones who think there’s no room for anything they consider “not notable”.

If you’re any sort of Wikipedian at all, have you reduced the level of your participation, and if so, why?

And if people like you have given up on Wikipedia, what will happen to it? Will co-founder Jimmy Wales get what he seems to want — everything gets locked down and edits are only published after they have been approved — or will the content gradually decay due to random edits/vandalism?

Although Wikipedia has been a poster-child for “user generated content” and “crowd-sourcing,” the community-based approach has always been a means, not an end. The aim of Wikipedia is to produce a viable free encyclopedia, not just in English but in all the world’s major languages. Wikipedia doesn’t have to care how the work gets done, as long as it gets done for nothing.

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