From our front-page news:
When I stand back and picture what I do on the Internet, I'm kind of shocked that it's not much. I regularly visit certain news sites, such as CNN and Digg, sports sites, like Soccernet and ESPN.com and past that, I can't think of any other site I visit on a regular basis, which is a bit sad if you ask me. Oh, right... I forgot all about Wikipedia. I am not sure about you guys, but this is a site I end up visiting every single day, and I can't see that changing.
It doesn't matter what it is... if I need a bit of info, I don't go to a search engine (unless it's technical), but to Wikipedia. If I want to remember who scored the winning touchdown of a previous Super Bowl, find out the brake horsepower of the original Miura, check up on my favorite bands to see if a new album is en route, find the actor from a movie or read up on some remote country that most people haven't even heard of, I go to Wikipedia.
Heck, Wikipedia in itself could be considered a news site, because if big news breaks, you can expect the respective Wikipedia page to be updated before you even get there, and that, to me, is incredible. Because I rely on the site so often, it's kind of disheartening to learn that there's a noticeable trend of volunteers leaving, due to distaste with the article approval process, and other site politics. How bad is it? In the first quarter of 2008, 4,900 people left the site. This year, that number rose to 49,000.
Because Wikipedia is a non-profit organization, and has few employees, anyone who edits or adds a page to the site is a volunteer. The biggest issue is that on occasion, someone will put work into a page, upload it, and someone else will take it down because they don't believe it fits the site's standards. But, if the writer feels it deserves to be there, then they have to debate it out, and that's obviously going to lessen the overall appeal of the site, you'd imagine.
I've written and updated certain Wikipedia pages in the past (mostly music), and I know that it's not that much fun. So with that, I appreciate what all these volunteers do, and hate to see that the trend of them leaving continue. It raises an alarm on the future of the site, because without volunteers, Wikipedia wouldn't have much reason to exist - at least for up-to-date information. There are a billion solutions to the problem, but likewise, there's a billion things that could go horribly wrong with any of them. I think Wikipedia is going to be safe for quite a while, but something clearly needs to be done.
Research reveals that the volunteers who create the pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning the site in unprecedented numbers. Every month tens of thousands of Wikipedia’s editors are going "dead" - no longer actively contributing and updating the site - without a similar number of new contributors taking their place. Some argue that Wikipedia’s troubles represent a new phase for the internet. Maybe, as some believe, the website has become part of the establishment that it was supposed to change.
Source: Times Online
It doesn't matter what it is... if I need a bit of info, I don't go to a search engine (unless it's technical), but to Wikipedia. If I want to remember who scored the winning touchdown of a previous Super Bowl, find out the brake horsepower of the original Miura, check up on my favorite bands to see if a new album is en route, find the actor from a movie or read up on some remote country that most people haven't even heard of, I go to Wikipedia.
Heck, Wikipedia in itself could be considered a news site, because if big news breaks, you can expect the respective Wikipedia page to be updated before you even get there, and that, to me, is incredible. Because I rely on the site so often, it's kind of disheartening to learn that there's a noticeable trend of volunteers leaving, due to distaste with the article approval process, and other site politics. How bad is it? In the first quarter of 2008, 4,900 people left the site. This year, that number rose to 49,000.
Because Wikipedia is a non-profit organization, and has few employees, anyone who edits or adds a page to the site is a volunteer. The biggest issue is that on occasion, someone will put work into a page, upload it, and someone else will take it down because they don't believe it fits the site's standards. But, if the writer feels it deserves to be there, then they have to debate it out, and that's obviously going to lessen the overall appeal of the site, you'd imagine.
I've written and updated certain Wikipedia pages in the past (mostly music), and I know that it's not that much fun. So with that, I appreciate what all these volunteers do, and hate to see that the trend of them leaving continue. It raises an alarm on the future of the site, because without volunteers, Wikipedia wouldn't have much reason to exist - at least for up-to-date information. There are a billion solutions to the problem, but likewise, there's a billion things that could go horribly wrong with any of them. I think Wikipedia is going to be safe for quite a while, but something clearly needs to be done.
Research reveals that the volunteers who create the pages, check facts and adapt the site are abandoning the site in unprecedented numbers. Every month tens of thousands of Wikipedia’s editors are going "dead" - no longer actively contributing and updating the site - without a similar number of new contributors taking their place. Some argue that Wikipedia’s troubles represent a new phase for the internet. Maybe, as some believe, the website has become part of the establishment that it was supposed to change.
Source: Times Online