14 DAY TRIAL // More and more people are quick to seal the fate of Wikipedia and a couple of studies in the past year are being used as clear evidence that the site is headed for disaster if not in the short term future. Recently, a study by Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, which found that 49,000 volunteer editors left the site in just three months, has spread after a story in the WSJ. Now Wikimedia, the organization behind the popular website, has responded to set the record straight and put some perspective on the numbers.
Erik Moeller, deputy director and Erik Zachte, data analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation, start off by pointing out that the organization's definition of an editor differs from that of the researcher. In the study, anyone who has made an edit is considered an editor, leading to a total number of over three million editors across all language versions of the site. Wikimedia, however, counts only those who have made at least five edits leading to a smaller number of just one million editors. This way, the number of volunteers who are leaving or the overall trend is unlikely to be the same. There are some other issues with the numbers and the blog post details several of them.
The two go on and share their own data regarding monthly active users, in line with data from a previous study, which they admit have hit a peak in 2007 and have dropped off and then leveled since. Overall, across all languages, the number of active editors, those with five or more edits per month, has been constant while several languages have seen a steady rise.
The organization doesn't discount the findings of the studies outright, but shows several stats which would indicate that the site is in no way in trouble. First, the number of visitors is continuing to grow and Wikipedia saw 344 million unique visitors from around the world in October, a six percent jump from the previous month. Wikipedia is now the fifth most popular website in the world. The number of articles is still growing, Wikipedia being at around 14.4 million entries now and with more added every month. Finally, the number of editors has stayed constant for the past couple of years.
Being an organization focused on science and knowledge, Wikimedia is careful not to dismiss the work carried out by researches who focus on the site, but is confident that, on the whole, the group is doing a good job at ensuring the site's future. “The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to ensure that every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. Both the health and growth of our volunteer community are key to succeeding in that endeavor. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation works with researchers from around the world to understand what is happening in its projects, supports comprehensive analytics work, and is pursuing long term initiatives to recruit new editors and support the development of its communities,” Moeller and Zachte write.