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If you spend a lot of time using Wikipedia to unofficially settle bets like me, you've probably noticed recently that many of the crowdsourced encyclopedia's entries have started to get a little stale as volunteer enthusiasm for the project has waned.
Paradoxically, the world's most recognized crowdsourcing project has been in decline editorially for the past five years as its traffic only grows steadily with each year, according to its own report card. While the number of articles obviously continues to increase as, you know -- more stuff happens -- the number of active editors (known in the Wiki world as Wikipedians) has been slowly declining on the English versions of the site since peaking in 2007.
That means lots of articles have increasingly become incomplete, inaccurate or out-of-date. But with global internet penetration, along with Wikipedia's total article count, continuing to grow, it has managed to seemingly cement its place in the list of top 10 web properties according to Alexa and others.
Or maybe not.
The steady upward trajectory of growth in page views for Wikipedia has begun to become a bit shaky over the past two years. Peaks and valleys have begun to show up in what was once a straight line reaching to the sky. The erosion is most evident in the English language versions, which peaked in terms of page views in April of 2010 and then fell again, jumped up and down a bit only to regain some momentum and hit a new peak (just barely) in November of 2012.
Perhaps more telling is Alexa's data on Wikipedia, which shows a rather pronounced drop in the encyclopedia's popularity (when compared to all other sites on the Internet) beginning in August of 2012 that it didn't manage to fully recover from before the end of the year.
Could it be that knowledge seekers and bet-settlers are finally beginning to look elswhere online for answers?
"The problem Wikipedia faces is that it has many, many more readers than editors (only 6% of readers have ever tried, according to a 2011 survey) even if the line between them is supposedly no thicker than choosing to click the “Edit” button at the top of a page," writes William Beutler recently in his blog, The Wikipedian.
Beutler suspects that part of the problem in motivating more editors to contribute is that most of the popular topics have already been pretty well covered. Today the best opportunities for budding Wikipedians lies further outside the news cycle and more common topics than in years past. Beutler says areas like fairy tales, historical novels and pop culture from the 1990s are just a few places in need of some attention.
While Wiki editors may understandably be struggling to keep up with maintaining a virutal repository of all human knowledge, donors to the non-profit parent Wikimedia Foundation still seem to be enthusiastically tossing their dollars in the direction of Jimmy Wales and company.
The foundation announced recently that over 1.2 million Wikipedia readers donated a total of more than $25 million during its 2012 fundraiser.
The fundraising drive was the ninth annual to pay for server fees, increase the number of wiki editors, improve site software and keep Wikipedia and its sister sites ad-free.
“I’m grateful that the Wikipedia fundraiser was so successful. Our supporters are wonderful and without them we could not do the job of delivering free content worldwide,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Perhaps as a sign of improving economic conditions, or the declining quality of many Wikipedia entries, or just another Wiki-paradox, the Wikimedia Foundation says it completed its fundraising drive in record time, running the campaign on 5 English Wikipedia sites (in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand) for only 9 days, down from a 46-day campaign in 2011.
Wikimedia also says that while donations keep the lights on, the wiki operation still relies on roughly 80,000 volunteer editors, photographers and other contributors worldwide.
Some of the funds will also go to continuing to develop Wikipedia's mobile presence, which Gardner recently told AFP she sees as both an opportunity and a threat for the Wiki future:
"I think a lot about the shift to mobile devices from laptops and desk tops. It looks that the Internet is taking turn towards people using devices for consuming content more than creating it."
That's right, Wikipedia made over a century's worth of Encyclopaedia Brittanca's clout obsolete in just a few years, and now Angry Birds and Flipboard may wind up delivering the same blow to Wikipedia by stealing away all those spare hours the crowd could have been using to edit articles on the Oort Cloud or mitosis.
What do you think? Is Wikipedia beginning a downward spiral? Or did it begin long ago? Or will it continue to be a leading source of knowledge for some time forward? Let us know in the comments.
- Eric Mack is Managing Editor for Crowdsourcing.org. He has covered business, technology and politics for more than a decade for major outlets including CNET, CBS, AOL, NPR, Wired, and the New York Times. You can contact him at eric.mack@crowdsourcing.org. Find him on Twitter and Google+. Also be sure to follow Crowdsourcing.org on Twitter.
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Posted by Eric Mack
The major concern is not wikipedia's decline, it is the fact that alternatives to wikipedia are pushed out of the way. I blame this on Google. It places wikipedia in search rankings above other encyclopaedias such as Britannica online, such that people have come to rely on wikipedia over others. For me the decline and fall of wikipedia wont be mourned - crowd sourcing is not the way to go if you want accurate information.
Not all pages will become outdated. My field (British Literature), as an example, can last indefinitely for most pages if they are done right. The quality of pages is incredibly low and there is a lot of work to be done. The structure does not support editors who do content work, and those in power tend to be those most against such individuals.
Eric Mack has given us an interesting piece about Wikipedia's decline, but it's one that contributors at Wikipediocracy.com have been aware of for years. One of the key reasons why Wikipedia is failing to attract new editors is the openly hostile environment that's fostered at Wikipedia. Editors who make mistakes are publicly ridiculed, and editors with long-term experience who begin to realize that the Wikimedia Foundation is a cash scam are censored and pushed out of the editing community. What this piece lacked was hard numbers (preferably from the federal Form 990) about how much money the Wikimedia Foundation wastes. The article above says "donations keep the lights on" -- yet the Foundation spends less than 8% of its revenue on servers and bandwidth. Indeed, even if you roll up *all* of the program services that can legitimately be counted a supporting the tax-exempt, non-profit mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, only 47% of revenues are spent on those program services.
I am a specialist in medieval philosophy, and in the history of philosophy. The Wikipedia articles relating to this subject area are incomplete and incredibly poor, compared to traditionally produced online sources such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and even compared to Britannica. I do not believe that crowdsourcing can produce anything of value in areas where expertise is required.
"The structure does not support editors who do content work, and those in power tend to be those most against such individuals. " I wonder if you could explain a little more what you mean by this? Not sure I understand.
Mr. Mack - I am an expert in 18th and 19th century British Literature. I came to Wikipedia in 2008 because of a comment one of my mentors made about the inadequacy of a biography there. He went to check on Wikipedia's article on Christopher Smart to see if there was anything "current". The article was a copy of the 1911 Britannica entry. It was horrendous. I began to work on areas of my mentor's expertise while writing articles and other things (I was putting together 4 articles on Swift and Smart, updating a bibliography on Smart, and some other material), and I proceeded to dump my research on Wikipedia to improve the pages.
Almost immediately, an admin named Geogre started to harass me. Apparently, he felt that with his grad school drop out background and his amateurish understanding of Swift that he was the closest thing to an "expert" allowed on Wikipedia in the field. He used a sock puppet and a group of 4 friends to stalk me across Wikipedia, vandalizing pages, harassing me in real life, etc. I even had some of the top experts email into the Arbitration Committee and Wikimedia Foundation to verify that my summaries of the actual criticism and my work was correct whereas the claims against me and the harassment was unfounded.
I do not have the time nor the lack of ethics required to operate multiple sock puppet accounts nor do I have the lack of fortitude required to harass people in such a manner. I was not an admin because I did not sock nor game the system. I did not climb the social ladder through sucking up to people. Instead, I wrote articles. I produced 10 articles that were displayed on the front page, and in 2009 I held the record for most amount of featured content created by one person in such a span of time. At the same time, I had many sock masters harass me, stalk me in real life, send my phone number, address, and other personal information out through email, had my real life work mocked by them because I am Catholic (yes, the anti-religious bigotry is quite prominent), etc. When I asked for something to be done, I was labelled paranoid by people who were able to get into the Arbitration Committee even though they had questionable content experience, had histories of plagiarism, etc.
In leaked emails, I was said by one of those individuals to have been worse than a user who was deemed both a pedophile and an abuser of admin privileges for the intent to cause others harm. Yet I never cussed, I never used derogatory language, and I only pointed out how people were unfairly using multiple accounts, ganging up on people, lying about what sources said/plagiarizing from sources, and other unethical actions. Every person I accused of inappropriate behavior was verified as acting inappropriately, but it would take years before they received any punishment.
That is how the Wikipedia system works. That is how it will always work. The anonymity of the website allows people to create multiple false identities and use it to bring harm to others. It is not a meritocracy. Producing high quality content matters very little. Instead, it has been from the start a network similar to a Hobbsian sense of the state of nature. As long as people are able to game the system and amateurs hold more power than experts, there will always be a structural failure at Wikipedia.
Would everyone who has had similar (or other) negative experiences like those mentioned in the comments shoot me a line at eric.mack@crowdsourcing.org? Would be glad to do some deeper, follow-up reporting.
We had a similar experience to the comments above regards altering an inaccuracy in 'one' line of an article which included a description of our company. The next time I logged in I found my account had been blocked 'indefinately' and any attempt to reach the author/editor who blocked it to explain the inaccuracy and therefore my edit - sent me on a circle of click throughs to nowhere. The language in the click through pages was extremely aggressive.
The editor was linked to another organisation who had a vested interest in presenting the inaccuracy and indeed also had inaccurate staements on their web site and other links seeking to undermine us - for no reason other than personal interests and a lack of understanding of our organisation.
Nearly two years later our account is still blocked and the inaccurate editorial remains.
There is no opportunity to contact any one at Wikipedia to seek re-dress - we like many others remain blocked and misrepresented at the whim of others with vested interest.
The danger is that those that rely on Wikipedia for accurate information and then use it as fact or to base their own decision making on are being mis-guided and or perpetuating the inaccuracies.
Wikipedia needs to use some of those donations to put in place a permanent administration team where users with issues such as some mentioned in these comments can seek 'objective' re-dress.
If thedon't the whole purpose of Wikipedia will begin to crumble.