Looking back, it was naive to expect Wikipedia's joyride to last forever. Since its inception in 2001, the user-written online encyclopedia has expanded just as everything else online has: exponentially. Up until about two years ago, Wikipedians were adding, on average, some 2,200 new articles to the project every day. The English version hit the 2 million — article mark in September 2007 and then the 3 million mark in August 2009 — surpassing the 600-year-old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia as the largest collection of general knowledge ever compiled (well, at least according to Wikipedia's entry on itself).
But early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia's growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages. "When we first noticed it, we thought it was a blip," says Ed Chi, a computer scientist at California's Palo Alto Research Center whose lab has studied Wikipedia extensively. But Wikipedia peaked in March 2007 at about 820,000 contributors; the site hasn't seen as many editors since. "By the middle of 2009, we realized that this was a real phenomenon," says Chi. "It's no longer growing exponentially. Something very different is happening now."
What stunted Wikipedia's growth? And what does the slump tell us about the long-term viability of such strange and invaluable online experiments? Perhaps that the Web has limits after all, particularly when it comes to the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing. Wikipedians — the volunteers who run the site, especially the approximately 1,000 editors who wield the most power over what you see — have been in a self-reflective mood. Not only is Wikipedia slowing, but also new stats suggest that hard-core participants are a pretty homogeneous set — the opposite of the ecumenical wiki ideal. Women, for instance, make up only 13% of contributors. The project's annual conference in Buenos Aires this summer bustled with discussions about the numbers and how the movement can attract a wider class of participants.
At the same time, volunteers have been trying to improve Wikipedia's trustworthiness, which has been sullied by a few defamatory hoaxes — most notably, one involving the journalist John Seigenthaler, whose Wikipedia entry falsely stated that he'd been a suspect in the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations. They recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people. In the past, only articles on high-profile subjects like Barack Obama were protected from anonymous revisions. Under the new plan, people can freely alter Wikipedia articles on, say, their local officials or company head — but those changes will become live only once they've been vetted by a Wikipedia administrator. "Few articles on Wikipedia are more important than those that are about people who are actually walking the earth," says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the encyclopedia. "What we want to do is find ways to be more fair, accurate, and to do better — to be nicer — to those people."
Yet that gets to Wikipedia's central dilemma. Chi's research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos — that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding to its corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy. "It may be that the bureaucracy is inevitable when a project like this becomes sufficiently important," Chi says. But who wants to participate in a project lousy with bureaucrats?
There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia's slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else — well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial" — making sure that articles are well formatted and readable.
Chi thinks something more drastic has occurred: the Web's first major ecosystem collapse. Think of Wikipedia's community of volunteer editors as a family of bunnies left to roam freely over an abundant green prairie. In early, fat times, their numbers grow geometrically. More bunnies consume more resources, though, and at some point, the prairie becomes depleted, and the population crashes.
Instead of prairie grasses, Wikipedia's natural resource is an emotion. "There's the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live," says Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation's executive director. In Wikipedia's early days, every new addition to the site had a roughly equal chance of surviving editors' scrutiny. Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by élite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your edits to stick, you've got to learn to cite the complex laws of Wikipedia in arguments with other editors. Together, these changes have created a community not very hospitable to newcomers. Chi says, "People begin to wonder, 'Why should I contribute anymore?'" — and suddenly, like rabbits out of food, Wikipedia's population stops growing.
The foundation has been working to address some of these issues; for example, it is improving the site's antiquated, often incomprehensible editing interface. But as for the larger issue of trying to attract a more diverse constituency, it has no specific plan — only a goal. "The average Wikipedian is a young man in a wealthy country who's probably a grad student — somebody who's smart, literate, engaged in the world of ideas, thinking, learning, writing all the time," Gardner says. Those people are invaluable, she notes, but the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women and experts in various specialties that have traditionally been divorced from tech. "We're just starting to get our heads around this. It's a genuinely difficult problem," Gardner says. "Obviously, Wikipedia is pretty good now. It works. But our challenge is to build a rich, diverse, broad culture of people, which is harder than it looks."
Before Wikipedia, nobody would have believed that an anonymous band of strangers could create something so useful. So is it crazy to imagine that, given the difficulties it faces, someday the whole experiment might blow up? "There are some bloggers out there who say, 'Oh, yeah, Wikipedia will be gone in five years,'" Chi says. "I think that's sensational. But our data does suggest its existence in 10 or 15 years may be in question."
Ten years is a long time on the Internet — longer than Wikipedia has even existed. Michael Snow, the foundation's chairman, says he's got a "fair amount of confidence" that Wikipedia will go on. It remains a precious resource — a completely free journal available to anyone and the model for a mode of online collaboration once hailed as revolutionary. Still, Wikipedia's troubles suggest the limits of Web 2.0 — that when an idealized community gets too big, it starts becoming dysfunctional. Just like every other human organization.
- Source - Time Magazine Article
Jimmy Wales Quietly Edits Wikipedia's New Edit Policy
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-2,00.html#ixzz0cS1McsRl
By Farhad Manjoo / San Francisco Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009
Late in August, Wikipedia announced that it was reining in its freewheeling ways. In several interviews, including many with TIME, officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that manages Wikipedia, explained that the user-edited online encyclopedia would soon impose restrictions on articles about living people. Under the new policy, anonymous Web editors would still be allowed to freely change biographical Wikipedia entries — but their changes would be made visible to readers only after an experienced Wikipedia volunteer had approved them. The plan, officials explained, would make the world's largest encyclopedia more accurate and fair, and would help prevent the high-profile hoaxes that have occasionally tarnished Wikipedia's reputation.
There's only one problem with the new policy: "It's just completely wrong," says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder. Wales says that reports of Wikipedia's clampdown to prevent errors have themselves been in error. Wikipedia's ruling body of volunteers never decided to impose restrictions on all articles about living people. Instead, the site will adopt "flagged protection" — the new method for requiring editorial approval before changes to Wikipedia go up — for a small number of articles, most likely on a case-by-case basis. (See the 50 best websites of 2009.)
The plan — still under development and, like everything else about Wikipedia, in flux — means that the online encyclopedia will undergo a far less momentous change than was previously reported. Wikipedia has long imposed tight controls on articles about boldface names — entries on Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Britney Spears, among roughly 3,000 others, are "semi-protected," meaning they can't be edited by anonymous surfers. Wales says that, at least initially, the new flagged-protection plan will probably apply to the same set of controversial articles, which are most prone to vandalism. But the vast majority of articles — even the ones about relatively famous people, like your average U.S. Senator or late-night talk-show host — would remain open to alteration by Web surfers.
In some ways, then, the new policy will make Wikipedia more open to anonymous contributions, not less. Not only will novices to the site still be able to edit most articles, they'll also be able to make changes to protected pages like Obama's; their changes will become visible only if approved by senior Wikipedians. Under the current rules, people new to Wikipedia are blocked from editing protected articles. (See the 25 best blogs of 2009.)
Why did news of what turned out to be non-existing restrictions spread around the Web? Blame Wikipedia's fractured organization. Policy decisions are made by a community of volunteers, and the foundation that runs the site isn't always aware of the specific rules that the group might adopt. When told about Wales' narrower view of the new policy, Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the nonprofit, was surprised. "This is the first I've heard of it," he said in an e-mail. Indeed, even the foundation's blog reported that the restrictions would apply broadly to all entries on living people. It has, like lots of things on Wikipedia, since been amended. (Read "Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?")
There's no small amount of irony in the fact that Wikipedia's efforts to reduce errors and misinformation have been clouded by misinformation. Or you might say that's par for the course: On the Web, we get to the truth in fits and starts — but eventually, as on Wikipedia, the real facts seep out
A Brief History of Wikipedia
Like it or loathe it, Wikipedia is a force. When contributors penned its new entry on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen on Aug. 17, the English-language version of the controversial user-generated encyclopedia reached 3 million entries. More impressive still: more than 10 million users contributed to that milestone. Not bad for a service originally conceived as an afterthought to Nupedia, a failed first attempt by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Lawrence Sanger at creating a free online encyclopedia.
When Nupedia was created in 2000, the plan was for it to feature expert-written, peer-reviewed content. But it suffered from a major problem: a lack of speed. In its first six months, only two articles made it through the process. To spur better production, Sanger suggested creating a counterpart that anyone could contribute to without editorial review. Wikipedia.com went live on Jan. 15, 2001, and the new model quickly eclipsed its older sibling. By the end of the first year, Wikipedia contained more than 20,000 articles in 18 languages. Since then, the site has grown rapidly, swelling to 250,000 articles by 2004 and a million by 2006. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)
Even in its earliest days, Wikipedia had to reckon with a slew of problems. Among them were vandalism and the lack of a fixed formula for determining what should and shouldn't be included in an encyclopedia unconstrained by physical limitations. The emerging community included a volunteer army of editors, who helped to keep the content aligned with Wikipedia's rules, the first version of which Sanger created in 2002. As the project grew, vandalization and dilution of the encyclopedia's content became more difficult to address. The site's software keeps a log of every modification to every page, and this tracking system has been used to bust some high-profile offenders. In May, Wikipedia banned IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology on the grounds that Scientologists were making edits that didn't suggest a "neutral point of view" — the encyclopedia's golden rule.
But since its inception, the biggest issue dogging Wikipedia has been concerns about its accuracy. Sanger himself left Wikipedia in 2002 over questions about the legitimacy of the project's entries; he later established a competing encyclopedia, Citizendium, with more rigorous contribution criteria. While a 2005 study by Nature found that Wikipedia's science entries came close to matching the Encyclopaedia Britannica's in terms of accuracy — with 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia — no one argues that Wikipedia's content is flawless. Critics say the writing is clunky or prone to bias and that the authors focus on pet projects. Indeed, the site's list of Star Wars creatures totals more than 15,000 words, while the entire entry on World War II has just 10,000.
Running an organization as influential as Wikipedia isn't inexpensive. The company's costs reach nearly $6 million per year, and though it recorded more than 100 billion page views last year, the site has no advertisements. With that level of traffic, even a single text advertisement per page would net Wikipedia millions of dollars, but Wales is insistent that the service, which is supported by private donations, remains ad-free.
As impressive a milestone as 3 million articles is, it simply makes the English Wikipedia the largest component of a massive international enterprise. Wikipedia now contains more than 13 million articles in 271 different languages. The German-language version is the next largest, with more than 900,000 entries, but there's something for readers of every language. Even Cheyenne, which is spoken by only 1,700 Native Americans, has its own version of Wikipedia, although it boasts just 62 articles. Wales, who remains the "spiritual head" of the movement, says he wants Wikipedia to one day contain the sum of human knowledge. It has a way to go, but in just a few years the site has come closer to reaching that lofty goal than anything else