Wikipedia

Wiki-based encyclopedia, created by volunteer anonymous contributors, has had a growing audience. However it is far to get unanimous.

I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool.

So says John Seigenthaler after a Wikipedia article presented him as the instigator of the murder of JG Kennedy and his brother Bobby. It was actually a hoax, but stayed for 5 months in Wkipedia and was quoted by reference sites!

Disaffection

The Wikimedia Foundation is responding to a study that shows a change in the way Wikipedia works, which is becoming more and more a restricted community hostile to occasional publishers. Researchers at Palo Alto Research Center in California warn that the evolution of wiki could jeopardize its future. The content creation is in regression,  fewer and fewer articles are created and fewer edits are made.

One could explain this by the fact that many pages have been created (3 million for the English subdomain), so the need to complete the site becomes less obvious. But it seems that the problem comes from elsewhere.

Not only the number of items created per month is reduced but the number of monthly contributions (5.5 million) and publishers – registered or not – (750 000), is reduced too.

The occasional publishers are apparently object of ostracism. 25% of their contributions are deleted against 10% a few years ago. Thus, according to researchers, older publishers do act of resistance towards others, which tends to discourage them and leads to lower the quality of the content of the site.

This worries the Wikimedia Foundation and it has launched an operation to try to understand the phenomenon.

According to Google Trends for Website, Wikipedia.org’s traffic as a whole is declining slowly. This confirms the conclusions derived by the authors of this study.

trend-wikipedia

The search engine Google, the source of most of the traffic of the site, always provided it with a preferential position in results pages. But it also tends to promote new content and related news. The stagnation of the renewal of the site content is consistent with the decline in its audience.

Tools

References