An article called Fears over future of Wikipedia as 49,000 volunteers leave site is making the rounds this week. The punch line:
The English-language version of the site suffered a net loss of 49,000 volunteer 'editors' in the first three months of this year, compared with 4,900 for the same period a year earlier, according to a university study.
This is believed to be a result of increased bureaucracy to prevent errors -- such as the death of Senator Edward Kennedy being announced prematurely -- and the sense that Wikipedia is now part of the establishment.
As someone who uses Wikipedia probably an average of 5 times a day, this is frightening. But if you read the article, you will notice that despite their 49,000 number, they neglect to mention how many total contributors there are. This is especially troubling considering that the statistics are freely available via stats.wikimedia.org.
The charts simply do not tell the same story:
Total Wikipedia contributors by language, July 2001 to October 2009.
Total Wikipedia contributors with 5 or more edits per week, July 2001 to October 2009.
Total edits per day, July 2001 to October 2009.
In summary, the total number of English contributors might finally be leveling off after 9 solid years of growth. The number of active English contributors (5 or more edits per week) peaked in early 2007, and has been slowly declining since then, but it is nothing to worry about because it is still a very high number. There is a similar story to be told with the total number of edits per day.
Bottom line: You can ignore the news and sleep easily tonight because Wikipedia is in no imminent danger.
