Wikipedia "Slowly Dying"

**Hampsha** · 05-08-2011, 05:53 AM

Wikipedia is slowly dying
Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh
annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel
up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing
our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of
the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to
do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to
add; but this seems like a real existential threat.

Wikipedia needs to get cool again, somehow. When Wikipedia launched in the early naughts it was
attractively subversive—it pissed off your teachers, journalists and any square over 40, basically.
Idealistic young nerds flocked to the site with that early web 2.0 communal fervor. But new editors
aren't showing up at the same rate. After years at the top result on practically every Google search,
Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high
school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box
—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice.

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have
once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags. Wikipedia should
try to somehow harness the new fickle hive mind: Remember when hordes of Beliebers descended on
Esperanza Spalding's Wikipedia page and ravaged it after she beat out Justin Bieber for the Grammy?
All you've got to do is get 15-year-old girls as interested in, say, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg
and Gotha. Good luck with that, Jimmy Wales!

More here...

Wikipedia Says It's Losing Contributors : NPR

**BobR** · 05-08-2011, 06:08 AM

Sad but not surprising; the trolls who attack anything someone writes on Wikipedia for the most petty or silly of reasons, or out of pure bias are even worse than those on most forums such as this. It's a thankless job writing for Wikipedia.

Too bad since the quality of some of their writing is unsurpassed.

**CaptainNemo** · 07-08-2011, 08:34 PM

This sounds more like "product life cycle" stuff.

Wikipedia needs a relaunch, with some significant changes, to put it back at the heart of things... so that means stuff do with news that Twitter does, and multimedia, that Google's been doing; and perhaps heading more in the direction of something like the OU - gawd knows plenty of students rely on it...

The rot set in years ago... you'd get "trolls" in the "bridge-dwelling" sense, guarding articles, so you just couldn't edit, even if you had a PhD in the subject, you'd end up getting stuff hacked to pieces by a n00b who felt they had amassed great responsibility...
I used to edit in the early half of wikipedia's life, and pushed hard to get American and British english to fork in the early days (to avoid the boring arguments over things like Aubergines and "Rapalling", whatever that is), as plenty of other dialects had forked.
You'd get moderators who had joined particularly after 2006 maybe, who were arguably only made mods because they had no job, family, or social life to keep them busy, and it showed in their "contributions".

I saw people trying to set up more quality-controlled alternatives, like "Citizendium", but it doesn't work, because any expert worth their salt hasn't the time for that, and probably see it as an unnecessary reputational risk. You'd get little postgrad flids on there "losing focus" with their "debates".

I think governments, companies, and other organisations, have also got busy on Wikipedia too, and you've got to wonder how the model can maintain it's integrity under that sort of pressure.

**Butterfly** · 07-08-2011, 08:48 PM

maybe it's a normal life cycle thing, and who needs to constantly edit things when the matter has been approached and properly addressed,

these are for the general public, not academic or scholars papers

every single details can't be edited or reviewed just because they exist

it has to keep a certain superficiality to remain interesting, otherwise, it becomes impossible to read

**CaptainNemo** · 07-08-2011, 09:14 PM

^
True... or at least, you need to know who your audience is, they've tried to create a universal system, but it's become over-complex.
I think it's probably best aimed at students rather than any other "market".

**Butterfly** · 08-08-2011, 12:27 AM

some topics I want to have a quick overlook soon becomes impossible to read with an incredible level of details

who they think their audience is ? if they want to setup an authority system on everything, it shouldn't be wikipedia but more academypedia

the original idea was accessibility of information, not pedantry of information

**Agent_Smith** · 08-08-2011, 02:41 AM

Originally Posted by Hampsha

Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

That'll kill 90% of our cut and paste specialists here at TD!

(myself included)

**Begbie** · 08-08-2011, 06:42 AM

Mr Wales is actually part of the problem with his desire for Wikpedia to become part of the establishment. A scan of the discussion pages can be quite illuminating.

**Boon Mee** · 08-08-2011, 07:13 AM

Originally Posted by Butterfly

maybe it's a normal life cycle thing, and who needs o constantly edit things when the matter has been approached and properly addressed,

Heh...liberals of course. Re-writing history to suit their progressive ends...

**sabang** · 08-08-2011, 09:50 AM

^ Oh, so the Texas board of Education are 'liberal' now? Doesn't surprise me- under the current garbled use of the word, so are Pol Pot and the Incredible Hulk.

Wiki is a great resource for the casually curious. Be it information on a Thai temple, or a biography of a film star, whatever, it's there at your fingertips, free, and mostly pretty good. Not to be confused with the Bodleian or Library of Congress obviously, but neither is your average web surfer doing a PhD thesis. Long live, and chok dee.

**zingerhk** · 08-08-2011, 09:55 AM

I hope they can find an economic model that works, as it really has been an amazing business with so much value to so many people!!

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