Wikipedia's volunteer editors are giving up on the project in droves. In the first three months of 2009, the Wall Street Journal reports, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, which draws 325 million visitors per month, lost 49,000 of the volunteers who create and maintain its articles (compared to roughly 5000 defecters in the same period in 2008). In theory, fewer editors could mean more errors and fewer new entries. Is it curtains for Wikipedia?
Not at all – less is more: Why should we assume that Wikipedia’s loss of volunteers is “automatically a bad thing,” asks Adam Theirer at Technology Liberation Front. Yes, a large part of the encyclopedia’s appeal “lies in the sheer diversity” of available articles, which will surely be affected. But the Wikipedia Foundation has also issued more rigorous guidelines, a promising sign that they are taking “quality control seriously."
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