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Wikipedia Disputes Editor Exodus Claims
eldavojohn writes "The Wikimedia blog has a new post from Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Erik Zachte, a data analyst, to dispute recent reports about editors leaving Wikipedia (which we discussed on Wednesday). They offer these points to discredit the claims: '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." They also note that it's impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return, as their account still remains there."
Let me guess - you're not American?
The first two things listed may not be directly related to the number of editors - but that's the point! "Number of editors leaving" is a rather meaningless figure. You have to look at the whole picture, which is what he's doing. And the second one is related - they're still getting new articles, so there's yet to be any problem.
Editors are meaningless? No more than developers are meaningless to open source software, readers and users just come to consume. This is bit like a CEO looking at his financial statement saying it looks great after he fired R&D and marketing, sure current products and sales will last a while but magic 8-ball would say "outlook not so good".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wonder if they count some editors like me who intentionally add disinformation that looks credible on some level but is in fact an outright lie. Several such edits I've made have stayed there for years and nobody has put any [citation needed] tags in front of them either. As an example, I once edited John Kerry's page to say that he used to play polo in high school, and it stayed like that for 3 months.
Some people could be writing homework assignments that include my false factoids as real facts. This makes me giggle inside. If trolling was an actual trade, I'd be the CEO of a large corporation right now.