What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this
week, the Wall Street Journal reported
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125893981183759969.html> that
“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive
description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia
community. Among other things, it describes recent research findings
regarding the number of Wikipedia editors. A quote from the article:
“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.”
Other news stories have further focused on this particular number,
some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise, others
highlighting its strengths and resilience. It’s understandable that
media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a
nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore
an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening
with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture
strategy.
In a nutshell, here’s what we know:
* The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow. In
October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world,
according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September. Wikipedia
is the fifth most popular web property in the world.
* The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. There are
about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones
added every day.
* 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. Every month, some people stop writing, and every
month, they are replaced by new people.
Continua:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/11/26/wikipedias-volunteer-story/
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