Has Wikipedia Peaked?

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."

Comments

It's accuracy, on the other hand

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Has peaked a long time ago. Before

--- PARAGRAPH FOR DEMOCRATS ---
Fox news started to edit it

--- PARAGRAPH FOR REPUBLICANS ---
CNN and BBC started editing it

Right now, a lot of articles are just plain dishonest. Just look up some controversial subjects. Contemporary forced subjugation and kidnapping children into slavery by muslims for example, or look at Bush's page that contains references to falsified news ...

Re:It's accuracy, on the other hand

[Applekid]

Thing is, dishonest articles and misleading text won't get fixed. I gave up contributing to Wikipedia when I had my editing slammed left and right from "regulars" selectively applying rules in order to shut out the unpopular. "No original research" only applies when your assertions are against consensus, regardless of how accurate, "You don't own the article" only applies if you're outnumbered by a bunch of others that do own the article, "Bias" only when you're striving for uniformity.

I mean, I'm not even talking about abortion or rape or anything... look at the fight over "XOR" vs. "Exclusive-OR". Sheesh.

http://www.wikitruth.info/ has some info... but don't take it's word on it. Give editing Wikipedia a shot and see the shitstorm it can raise.

Re:Natural?

[millwall]

[...] the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so.

Re:Wikiphobia

[Maury Markowitz]

Find yourself a wikifriend. I'd be happy to volunteer (look me up on the wiki, I'm not hard to find).

One new article with comments from a long-timer and you'll be off to the races.

My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia

[hansamurai]

Oh, there's plenty of things to write about, the community has slowly been taken over by a few who seemingly wish to destroy it from within, or at least shape it into their ideal site. Legitimate and well written articles are constantly deleted or merged because they're "not notable" or they're fancruft. These of course, are okay reasons to delete articles, but when entire projects are basically swept away by one person who twist the guidelines in their favor (or had a corrupt hand in writing them in the first place), it's a great turn off.

People go around touting "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" in one discussion, and then in the next want to get rid or some article because "it's not encyclopedic." I guess I see my ideal Wikipedia as a complete collection. If someone writes a decent, complete article on something somewhat obscure, and it's deleted because it's not notable enough, that just doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I'm just bitter and my view of Wikipedia doesn't agree with the majority? Don't know.

I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections. Those are some of the most interesting parts of an article if you ask me.

Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I am annoyed about how they're trying to rid of trivia sections. Those are some of the most interesting parts of an article if you ask me.

It's more than this. Wikipedia seems to have shifted from a content creation phase, to a content editing phase.

I've noticed a lot over the past few weeks that more and more articles are being edited to remove things like trivia section, add citations, and trim things quite a bit. There's also been a big move to remove many images from the site that are deemed "unsafe", i.e. copyrighted, for whatever reason.

I've spoken with people who became disgruntled with Wikipedia. They had the usual concerns, which I personally deemed trivial. However, one thing that did catch my ear was their dislike of the Wikipedia admins, or super editors, or whatever they are called. The stories matched up and went something like this:

Administrators are less concerned about content than they are about the "quality" of that content. Quality usually means, spell checks, structure, copyrights, citations and general "encyclopedic worthiness" of the underlying material. One gets to be an administrator by doing things like, spell checking, minor editing, rearranging and moving articles, deleting "unworthy" articles, etc. There's also a great desire for articles to conform to the rules and polices of the site.

The complaints usually revolved around pedantic and often autocratic admins deleting entire articles or a series of articles on "unworthy" topics; say an anime series or a fairly geeky debate on memes. Often very interesting content, like trivia sections** are removed wholesale. It's usually the case that the admins have grouped together and implemented a new "policy" which justifies their actions, despite how every many editors might object.

I'm not overly familiar with the politics Wikipedia, so I can't personally attest to much of this. However, the tale has come to me in a pretty consistent fashion from a variety of sources; namely that Wikipedia is slowly but surely being taken over by a very anal retentive clique of "Wikicrats", and that the tone of the place is changing accordingly. It sounded a little hyperbolic at the time, but slowly I'm beginning to see changes in the tone of articles.

I think it's a shift that Wikipedia was probably always going to make. But it seems a pity that the place is to become burdened by rules, policies and general bureaucracy. Death by a thousand kilometers of red tape seems an ill fitting fate for a site that blossomed by a billion altruistic edits.

**Though personally, I do think a few trivia sections could do with trimming.

I partly blame the "validators"

[Kinwolf]

Personally, I stopped adding contribution when two articles I wrote(about 2 comic books series that where published by Dark Horse years ago)where marked for deletion. When I asked why, the validator answered that he did a google search and found nothing on the subject, so it was not worthy of being there. So there you have it, if it's not on google, it does not exist and has no business being in an encyclopedia where knowledge is supposed to be kept. With such an attitude, I saw no reason to continue adding stuff there.

Re:Wikiphobia

[ta bu shi da yu]

Without seeing your edit history, it's a bit hard to comment. However, did you source the material you added? If you don't, it probably will get removed or modified.

Re:Answers

[tomhudson]

The whole question was silly. If the number of contributors were to drop by 95%, the Wiki would still be growing - in other words, it will only reach its peak when it completely stops getting contributions, which isn't happening.

Linda Mack and the Cabal

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that has ever edited any article on anything even remotely political is likely to have had their material completely removed within minutes, whether sourced or not and possibly their accounts banned. The extremist Administrator Jayjg is known to internally release your hidden IP address to other "Administrators" (when he is not spending literally years editing the article on circumcision) One of the highest Administrators, Slimvirgin was actually revealed to be a former intelligence agent named Linda Mack that spends nearly 24/7 on there with multiple sock puppets abusing editors.

It's not surprise to me that people are fed up with the likes of these and the duplicitous "Jimbo" Wales who claims to have an open encyclopedia. The problem is it only is only open to a few political extremists that have managed to get a foothold in the highest levels of adminstration and change phrases like "extrajudicial killing" or "assasination" to "targeted killing" or sex-trafficking to "human trafficking" to completely removed.

The "Human Rights in Israel" Article actually devotes a good part of its space to talking about why Amnesty International is actually anti-semitic for documenting violations Israel has made, and uses the lawyer that got OJ Simpson off a murder charge as the source!! I can't imagine why people would be fleeing this burning building in droves :-)

Re:Wikiphobia

[Opportunist]

Well, the question is how "independent" the source is. I've seen it more than once that it's been basically a circle-jerk. When you dig deep enough you'll see that those "sources" pretty much link to one another. That's also a way to fabricate "truth". A says something, B picks it up and points to A as its confirmation, C sees B and quotes it, which in turn A notices and uses C to support its "truth".

Now add in the agendas of A, B and C and you get quite funny twists and "quotes". Bet I can prove with the help of the WHO and a few other "sources" that second hand smoking is actually good for your health?

Simply quoting a source is meaningless if you can't verify how good the source is.

Re:It's the Administrators!

[HooliganIntellectual]

The problem is mostly with the other users. The administrators are a problem in that they help implement many pointless bureaucratic guidelines.

I'm a librarian and professional writer who has contributed to Wikipedia over the years, but have gotten tired of the bullshit created by other users. At this point I'm contributing more to other online open wiki projects. Wikipedia has lots of excellent content, but some pages just can't be changed because some people have staked them out as their turf and refuse to allow any edits. I know of pages that are clearly POV and inaccurate, but if I or anybody else tries to revise them and significantly change them, we'll be baited into violating the "three revert rule" or otherwise be harassed by the resident zealots.

Wikipedia itself has implemented some stupid policies and some unintentionally hilarious policies. The decision this year to start removing images from thousands of pages because of copyright concerns is just insanity to the nth degree. Whoever made this decision doesn't understand current copyright law, because their policy about images is even more draconian than the current draconian copyright law. Many images have been removed from pages that aren't violating any copyrights. But if Wikipedia admins want to piss on their product with stupid decisions like this, then they'll only drive more people away.

My favorite hilarious example of current Wikipedia stupidity is the warning tag attached to many pages that says "Trivia sections are discouraged by Wikipedia." Uh, guys, Wikipedia is primarily an encyclopedia about popular culture. Putting these warnings over trivia sections that won't be removed is just silly. The trivia sections are why people use Wikipedia. Another funny development is the proliferation of tagging of pages for being "stubs" and poorly sourced. Hello? After years of criticism, Wikipedia is just now getting self-conscious about its veracity? Funny!