Various observers have predicted the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence, with potential pitfalls from lack of quality-control or inconsistencies among contributors.
Alternative online encyclopedias have been proposed as replacements for Wikipedia, including WolframAlpha, [1] as well as the both now-defunct Knol (from Google) [2] [3] and Owl (from AOL). [4] A 2013 review raised alarms regarding Wikipedia's shortcomings on hoaxes, on vandalism, an imbalance of material, and inadequate quality control of articles. [5] Earlier critiques lamented the vulgar content and absence of sufficient references in articles. [6] Others suggest that the unwarranted deletion of useful articles from Wikipedia may portend its end, which itself inspired the creation of Deletionpedia. [7] [8]
Contrary to such predictions, Wikipedia has constantly grown in both size and influence. [9] [10] [11] [12] Recent developments with artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects have prompted new predictions that AI applications which consume free and open content will replace Wikipedia. [13]
Wikipedia is crowdsourced by a few million volunteer editors. Of the millions of registered editors, only tens of thousands contribute the majority of its contents, and a few thousands do quality control and maintenance work. As the encyclopedia expanded in the 2010s, the number of active editors did not grow in tandem. Various sources predicted that Wikipedia will eventually have too few editors to be functional and collapse from lack of participation. [5] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [ excessive citations ]
English Wikipedia has 851 volunteer administrators who perform various functions, including functions similar to those carried out by a forum moderator. Critics described their actions as harsh, bureaucratic, biased, unfair, or capricious and predicted that the resulting outrage would lead to the site's closure. [5] [20] [21]
Various 2012 articles reported that a decline in English Wikipedia's recruitment of new administrators could end Wikipedia. [22] [23]
Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. |
A 2014 trend analysis published in The Economist stated that "The number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years." [25] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was described by The Economist as substantially higher than in other (non-English Wikipedias). It reported that in other languages, the number of "active editors" (those with at least five edits per month) has been relatively constant since 2008: some 42,000 editors, with narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down.
In the English Wikipedia, the number of active editors peaked in 2007 at about 50,000 editors, and fell to 30,000 editors in 2014. [25]
Given that the trend analysis published in The Economist presented the number of active editors for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as remaining relatively constant, sustaining their numbers at approximately 42,000 active editors, the contrast pointed to the effectiveness of Wikipedia in those languages to retain their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis. [25] Though different language versions of Wikipedia have different policies, no comment identified a particular policy difference as potentially making a difference in the rate of editor attrition for English Wikipedia. [26] Editor count showed a slight uptick a year later, and no clear trend after that.
In a 2013 article, Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review said that for several years running, the number of Wikipedia editors had been falling, and cited the bureaucratic structure and rules as a factor. Simonite alleged that some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. [27] A January 2016 article in Time by Chris Wilson said Wikipedia might lose many editors because a collaboration of occasional editors and smart software will take the lead. [28]
Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult and discourages new potential contributors. [14] [17] Lih alleges there is serious disagreement among existing contributors on how to resolve this. In 2015 Lih feared for Wikipedia's long-term future while Brown feared problems with Wikipedia would remain and rival encyclopedias would not replace it. [14] [17]
As of 2015, there had been a marked decline in persons who viewed Wikipedia from their computers, and according to The Washington Post "[people are] far less likely to donate". [29] At the time, the Wikimedia Foundation reported reserves equivalent to one year's budgeted expenditures. On the other hand, the number of paid staff had ballooned, so those expenses increased. [29]
In 2021, Andreas Kolbe, a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, wrote that the Wikimedia Foundation was reaching its 10-year goal of a US$100 million endowment, five years earlier than planned, which may surprise donors and users around the world who regularly see Wikipedia fundraising banners. He also said accounting methods disguise the size of operating surpluses, top managers earn $300,000 – 400,000 a year, and over 40 people work exclusively on fundraising. [30]
On the eve of the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, associate professor of the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University Joseph Reagle conducted a retrospective study of numerous "predictions of the ends of Wikipedia" over two decades, divided into chronological waves: "Early growth (2001–2002)", "Nascent identity (2001–2005)", "Production model (2005–2010)", "Contributor attrition (2009–2017)" and the current period "(2020)". Each wave brought its distinctive fatal predictions, which never came true; as a result, Reagle concluded Wikipedia was not in danger. [31]
Concern grew in 2023 that the ubiquity and proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) may adversely affect Wikipedia. Rapid improvements and widespread application of AI may render Wikipedia obsolete, or at least reduce its importance. [32] Academic research in 2023 found that AI, when applied to Wikipedia, works most efficiently for error-correction, while Wikipedia still needs to be written by humans. [33]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
GNE was a project to create a free-content online encyclopedia, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation. The project was proposed by Richard Stallman in December 2000 and officially started in January 2001. It was moderated by Héctor Facundo Arena, an Argentine programmer and GNU activist.
Wikinews is a free-content news wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation that works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying, "On Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an encyclopedia article." Wikinews's neutral point of view policy aims to distinguish it from other citizen journalism efforts such as Indymedia and OhmyNews. In contrast to most Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikinews allows original work in the form of original reporting and interviews. In contrast to newspapers, Wikinews does not permit op-ed.
Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of July 2024, it was ranked fourth by Semrush, and seventh by Similarweb. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.
The Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has 1,976,234 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on 8 March 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on 16 May 2013. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and has the 4th-most edits. It also ranks 28th in terms of article depth among Wikipedias.
The Japanese Wikipedia is the Japanese edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of September 2024, it has almost 1,429,000 articles with 12,672 active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The lower-case term knol, which Google defined as a "unit of knowledge", referred to an article in the project. Knol was often viewed as a rival to Wikipedia.
Andrew Lih is an American new media researcher, consultant and writer, as well as an authority on both Wikipedia and internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. In 2013 he was appointed an associate professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Nupedia was an English-language online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with relevant subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by a committee of experts who predefined the rules. It had only 21 articles in its first year, compared with Wikipedia having 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.
This is a list of books about Wikipedia or for which Wikipedia is a major subject.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.
Gender bias on Wikipedia includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.
Aaron Halfaker is a principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research. He previously served as a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation until 2020.
Artificial intelligence is used in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for the purpose of developing those projects. Human and bot interaction in Wikimedia projects is routine and iterative.
In Wikipedia and similar wikis, an edit count is a record of the number of edits performed by a certain editor, or by all editors on a particular page. An edit, in this context, is an individually recorded change to the content of a page. Within Wikimedia projects, a number of tools exist to determine and compare edit counts, resulting in their usage for various purposes, with both positive and negative effects.
Wikipedia @ 20 is a book of essays about Wikipedia published by the MIT Press in late 2020, marking 20 years since the creation of Wikipedia. It was edited by academic and author Joseph M. Reagle Jr. and social researcher Jackie Koerner. Contributions came from 34 other Wikipedians, Wikimedians, academics, researchers, journalists, librarians, artists and others, reflecting on particular histories and future themes in Wikipedia discussions.
Jason Moore is an American Wikipedia editor among the English Wikipedia's most active contributors by edit count. Editing since 2007 as "Another Believer", he has specialized in current events, with coverage including the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd protests, and the culture of Portland, Oregon, where he is based. On Wikipedia, Moore has created and developed editor affinity groups for joint work on these topics. As an organizer in the Wikimedia movement, Moore has hosted meet-ups and edit-a-thons to train new editors.
Wikipedia, which has an entry on fart jokes, still deems some topics unworthy of inclusion.
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