Spanish study finds Wikipedia is losing thousands of editors

Spanish study finds Wikipedia is losing thousands of editors
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By m.p. - Nov 26, 2009 - 3:38 PM
The Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found the encyclopaedia's English-language version to have lost almost 50,000 editors in 3 months

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Editors are leaving the Web’s most popular free encyclopaedia in their droves, a study by Madrid’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos has found. The university said Wikipedia’s English-language version lost around 49,000 of its volunteer editors in the first three months of this year alone, compared to only 4,900 for the same period of 2008.

It’s still, however, the fifth most-visited site on the Net, and its number of visits, El Mundo said, continue to increase.
The problem, according to Professor Felipe Ortega from the Rey Juan Carlos, is that, ‘Wikipedia is becoming more hostile’. He told the Wall Street Journal that many people are getting burnt-out from having to debate the content of certain articles over and over again’.

The study’s results have been contested by Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia. He told the UK’s Telegraph that new editors come in at almost the same pace as others leave, saying numbers have stabilised simply because Wikipedia is so large. He commented, ‘You can’t keep growing forever, there are only so many people on the Internet’, while adding, ‘Wikipedia is doing just fine’.

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