Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 19, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia is in an image crisis. According to a study, membership numbers for the English-language version have fallen for the first time since January 2001, and committed authors are also becoming scarce. As Wikipedia author Robert Rohde shows in his surveys, new registrations have declined significantly over the course of this year. At the beginning of the year, the Internet encyclopedia had admittedly reached an all-time high – with around 10,000 registrations daily – but afterwards the membership figure had fallen by one third. The mood within the German community is no longer entirely unclouded either, although membership figures here still present themselves considerably more pleasantly.
One possible reason for the lull is the increasingly rough tone within the community. The portal, which owed its good reputation above all to its pluralistic and democratic principle, has increasingly come under criticism over the course of recent months because contributions have been altered or even deleted ever more frequently by administrators. From the operator side, these processes are justified with a claim to quality intended to ensure that the knowledge conveyed is well-founded and truthful. In order to be successful as an information source in the long term, increasing attention is being paid to seriousness and reliability. According to the opinion of many critics, however, the liberal and open principle that the encyclopedia originally followed is thereby lost.
“I would like to point out that this study was also viewed with some question marks within the community. A decline in membership figures could not be observed on the German-language site. The latest figures from May of this year also showed that activities have remained relatively constant,” Arne Klempert, managing director of Wikimedia Germany, counters Rohde’s surveys in a conversation with pressetext. By March 2007, the German Wikipedia site recorded around 1,000 authors who contributed more than 100 article edits per month and around 8,000 authors with more than five contributions monthly. “These figures refer to registered members. In addition, there is a considerable number of users who collaborate anonymously,” Klempert adds. He also could not confirm a decline in commitment, even if this cannot be expressed in concrete figures.
In any case, it cannot be denied that many community members are now annoyed about premature or overly radical article changes. The deletion of an article by one of Wikipedia’s two founders also caused a stir. A 19-year-old administrator of the portal had removed an article by Jimmy Wales about the career of a restaurant owner from the website because of “irrelevance”. Many users report in discussion forums that they were reprimanded by the administrator side or had to justify their “unimportant” topics. “I simply see two poles here. There are those who would like to see all knowledge that exists on the site. And then there is the other side, which wants a level of quality to be maintained. A group dealing with a topic simply needs a certain size in order to be able to provide well-founded information,” Klempert tells pressetext. In his opinion, criticism also frequently comes from companies that try to portray themselves glorified on Wikipedia and have failed in doing so.
