Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia loses authors
Jimmy Wales for the first time acknowledged that the number of editors for the free encyclopedia is declining. During his speech at The Associated Press, the founder of Wikipedia said that the non-profit organization that runs the project is now trying to simplify the editing of articles to attract new volunteers.
Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website on the Internet. Despite the general popularity of the encyclopedia, the typical project participant is the “26-year-old male geek,” said Wales.
The founder considers the technical complexity of the engine to be the main problem of Wikipedia, but he named another reason for the reduction in the number of activists. The fact is that the English-language encyclopedia has already grown to such size (3.7 million articles) that there is less room left for significant additions.
After ten years of work, many Wikipedia editors see that there is little that can improve the encyclopedia. Others leave for natural reasons - they grow up, get married, and they have less time to work on the project.
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There are other typical problems that prevent new authors from participating in the project - this is the dominance of the bureaucracy, and intolerance for newcomers whom nobody helps. All articles that do not meet the criteria of relevance are ruthlessly deleted (not to save on hosting costs, but to improve the quality of content, because with a large number of articles it will be more difficult to check them and keep them relevant). All this leads to the fact that participation in the project does not give any pleasure: the protective barriers to adding content are too high. No wonder they lack new volunteers.
As of March 2011, there were about 90,000 active members on Wikipedia. The goal is to increase this number by 5,000 over the year. In order to achieve this, now university teachers are encouraged to give students assignments for writing articles for Wikipedia. This is a very reasonable idea, because the community of authors can very skillfully evaluate the quality of the article.
In addition, the site recently launched a new feature WikiLove - the ability to send messages to other authors and put different icons, such as stars and cats. “It's like likes on Facebook,” explained Jimmy Wales.
Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website on the Internet. Despite the general popularity of the encyclopedia, the typical project participant is the “26-year-old male geek,” said Wales.
The founder considers the technical complexity of the engine to be the main problem of Wikipedia, but he named another reason for the reduction in the number of activists. The fact is that the English-language encyclopedia has already grown to such size (3.7 million articles) that there is less room left for significant additions.
After ten years of work, many Wikipedia editors see that there is little that can improve the encyclopedia. Others leave for natural reasons - they grow up, get married, and they have less time to work on the project.
')
There are other typical problems that prevent new authors from participating in the project - this is the dominance of the bureaucracy, and intolerance for newcomers whom nobody helps. All articles that do not meet the criteria of relevance are ruthlessly deleted (not to save on hosting costs, but to improve the quality of content, because with a large number of articles it will be more difficult to check them and keep them relevant). All this leads to the fact that participation in the project does not give any pleasure: the protective barriers to adding content are too high. No wonder they lack new volunteers.
As of March 2011, there were about 90,000 active members on Wikipedia. The goal is to increase this number by 5,000 over the year. In order to achieve this, now university teachers are encouraged to give students assignments for writing articles for Wikipedia. This is a very reasonable idea, because the community of authors can very skillfully evaluate the quality of the article.
In addition, the site recently launched a new feature WikiLove - the ability to send messages to other authors and put different icons, such as stars and cats. “It's like likes on Facebook,” explained Jimmy Wales.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/125721/
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