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photo: NICOLAS GOLDBERG FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (JIMMY WALES) |
What's wrong with wikipedia?
BY JULIA ANGWIN and GEOFFREY A. FOWLER
Eight years ago, Wikipedia began with the goal of providing everyone in the world free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” Today, the online encyclopedia is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with some 325 million monthly visitors. But what will Wikipedia be in the future? That’s a question the online encyclopedia’s operators are beginning to think about seriously. Despite Wikipedia’s rising popularity, the online volunteers who write, edit and police the site are quitting in unprecedented numbers. The declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia’s ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia lost a net of 49,000 editors, compared with a net loss of 4,900 during the same period in 2008, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega. UNRULY UNIVERSE Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit venture, acknowledge the declines, but believe they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors. “We need sufficient people to do the work that needs to be done,” says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation. “But the purpose of the project is not participation.” Indeed, Wikipedia remains enormously popular among users, with the number of Web visitors growing 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to comScore Media Metrix. Wikipedia contributors have been debating what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the complex rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe—particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and people. “Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment,” contends Mr. Ortega, the Spanish researcher. “Many people are getting burned out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again.” CROWDSOURCING Wikipedia’s struggles raise questions about the evolution of “crowdsourcing,” one of the Internet era’s most important principles. Crowdsourcing is the idea of integrating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of people to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations. But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule—and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox. “People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, says it still isn’t clear to him what the “right” number of volunteer “Wikipedians” should be. “If people think Wikipedia is done”—meaning that with three million articles in English, there’s not much left to write about—“that’s substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that’s a correctable problem.” Mr. Wales says his top priority is to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia’s articles. He’s pushing a new feature that would require top editors to approve all edits before they are displayed on the site. The idea is to prevent the kind of vandalism that last year declared Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death months before his actual passing. Mr. Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001, after getting frustrated that his effort to create an online encyclopedia was hampered by the slow pace of copy-editing and getting feedback from experts. He saw Wikipedia as a side project—a radical experiment with software that allows multiple people to edit the same Web page. One of Wikipedia’s principles is that decisions should be made by consensus-building. One of the few unbreakable rules is that articles must be written from a neutral point of view. Another is that anyone should be able to edit most articles. But Wikipedia’s popularity has strained its consensus-building culture to the breaking point. Wikipedia is now a constant target for vandals who spray virtual graffiti throughout the site—everything from political views presented as facts to jokes about their friends—and spammers who try to insert marketing messages into articles. In 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote about his own Wikipedia write-up, which unjustly accused him of murder. The resulting bad press was a wake-up call. Wikipedians began getting more aggressive about patrolling for vandals and blocking suspicious edits, according to Andrew Lih, a professor at the University of Southern California and a regular Wikipedia contributor. That helped transform the site into a more hierarchical society where volunteers had to negotiate a system of new rules. Wikipedia rolled out new antivandalism features, including “semiprotection,” which prevents newcomers from editing certain controversial articles. In 2008, Wikipedia’s editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to researchers at Xerox. ‘EASY WORK’ IS DONE Ms. Gardner, the foundation’s executive director, says the encyclopedia isn’t finished, but the “easy work” of contributing is done. To attract new recruits to help with the remaining work, she has hired an outreach team, held seminars to train editors in overlooked categories, and launched task forces to seek ways to increase participation in markets such as India. The foundation also developed a new design to make She says increasing contributor diversity is her top goal. A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men. Much of the task of making Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers falls to Frank Schulenburg, the foundation’s head of public outreach. One of Mr. Schulenburg’s first projects, called the “bookshelf,” is an effort to gather the basic rules for contributing to Wikipedia in one place for newcomers. To recruit more academics, Mr. Schulenburg devised an educational program called Wikipedia Academy. In July, he conducted the first such program in the U.S., for scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health. His goal was to entice the scientists to contribute to the site. Several participants started contributing right after Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At last year’s meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of Wikipedia’s declining ranks. “The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying,” said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on “smarter metrics” such as article quality.
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