Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia, has denied allegations that it is currently losing participants. However, it has admitted that more work must be done to attract more contributors.
Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most famous web property, had 344 million visitors in October, according to figures released by comScore Media Metrix.
This week’s report in The Wall Street Journal, however, asserted that Wikipedia is losing large numbers of contributors who write articles.
According to the report, 49,000 editors had deserted the site in the first quarter of 2009, ten times higher than the 4,900 editors it lost in the 2008’s first quarter.
The paper then speculated on the causes of the huge loss, suggesting that contributors usually feel frustrated every time they were asked to debate the articles’ content over and over again.
Wikipedia, however, has asserted that the figures cited in the newspaper are not correct, because those were taken from a research that tracked when an editor starts and stops editing.
“It is impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again. There are methodological challenges with determining the long-term trend of joining and leaving”, the company said in a blog post.
“Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak two and a half years ago, and has remained stable since then”.
Wikipedia has approximately 14.4 million articles and thousands are being added each day, the company said.
Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most famous web property, had 344 million visitors in October, according to figures released by comScore Media Metrix.
This week’s report in The Wall Street Journal, however, asserted that Wikipedia is losing large numbers of contributors who write articles.
According to the report, 49,000 editors had deserted the site in the first quarter of 2009, ten times higher than the 4,900 editors it lost in the 2008’s first quarter.
The paper then speculated on the causes of the huge loss, suggesting that contributors usually feel frustrated every time they were asked to debate the articles’ content over and over again.
Wikipedia, however, has asserted that the figures cited in the newspaper are not correct, because those were taken from a research that tracked when an editor starts and stops editing.
“It is impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again. There are methodological challenges with determining the long-term trend of joining and leaving”, the company said in a blog post.
“Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak two and a half years ago, and has remained stable since then”.
Wikipedia has approximately 14.4 million articles and thousands are being added each day, the company said.
RSS Feed