Can Wikipedia be saved?
Posted under: Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia, announced the “most successful fundraiser in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation“. Raising over $USD 8 Million (when the goal was $USD 7.5 Million) there is now enough money to keep the machines running and keep Wikipedia an advertisement free zone. But is this enough?
Last year the number of new articles posted on Wikipedia dropped to 20,000 per month, one third of those that were created in 2006 and the number of edits and active editors has also declined.
Why is this happening?
One of the reasons, in my opinion, might be that Wikipedia is seen by most of us as a resource and not as a tool: I find it amazing that there are still lots of people that don’t know they can contribute with content that will be available to the whole world.
But the main reason, I think, is that for a long time there is a war going on inside Wikipedia, a silent war that has been growing in scale and violence. Wikipedia can be a wonderful resource for fact checking but the truth is that if you are looking for some disruptive theme what you will find is a one sided view on the subject (Global Warming and The USofA education system come to mind). Over zealous editors, or just editors with a political agenda, try to the best of their ability to have information that reflects their point of view and not a balanced one. Also the chance that a new article gets deleted by an editor as been raising exponentially since 2006 and its now thought to be at a 25%, meaning that 1 in every 4 new articles gets deleted. With deletion comes frustration. With frustration comes abandonment (which is just a nice word to say “I’m not wasting my time on this!”).
The fact is that without new content, reflecting what is happening in the world around us, Wikipedia will cease to be the ultimate resource for content and will be just an archive.
Unless there is a way to bring democracy back to Wikipedia, a way to take some power out of the super-editors and the defeat of the proposal for Global sysops, I don’t think Wikipedia can be saved from itself.
What do you think? Did you ever contributed to a Wikipedia article? What is your experience? Let me know in the comments, please.
Picture Credits: Sifter under a CC License