Started eight years ago as a ’side project’ by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia receives more than 300 million visitors each month, making it the fifth most popular website in the world. Yet its contributing authors, its very lifeblood, are leaving in droves.
Some reasons for this sharp decline in contributors include a lack of new topics about which to write, as well as new rules imposed to curb spamming and graffiti and infighting among contributors. The new rules take up more than a hundred pages of space at Wikipedia. Started to circumvent the normally extensive lag time inherent in putting an entire encyclopedia online, Wikipedia applied ‘crowdsourcing’ to the online encyclopedia model.
Crowdsourcing is the principle of combining contributions from multiple users from all over the world. Wales added the ability of contributors to edit articles, and this is when the controversy began…from the ‘get go.’ Ask your local librarian’s opinion on Wikipedia and you are likely to get sneers of disdain. Wikipedia has been called “a huge electronic printing house with no editorial staff, publishing scores of self-written books contributed by self-appointed authors holding no credentials.”
In an effort to bolster Wikipedia’s credibility, Wales states that improving the accuracy of articles is top priority. Wikipedia has increased the number of contributions from academics through an outreach program which explains the how and why of contributing articles. And the once free-wheeling Wikipedia is now seeing the wisdom in using editors. Perhaps it still has a chance of making it onto your local librarian’s list of reputable content sources.
I know a lot of teachers who tell students not to use Wikapedia – I have trouble trusting a site that anyone can edit, and there have been some issues in the past about people being banned from editing. While there are usually valid reasons behind the banning, it makes Wikipedia look questionable because they are “picking and choosing” who can edit. Paid editors is a much better opinion for a site that wishes to be a trusted source of information.