Mass Crowdsourcing Exodus At Wikipedia

0 Comment(s) | Posted Nov 23, 2009 by Pat Morrell

Patrick Morrell

Wikipedia saw significant declines in user activity across the first 3 months of 2009, as more than 49,000 volunteer editor/posters left the site (versus 4,900 across the same period in 2008.)  As Wall Street Journal writers Julia Angwin and Geoffrey A. Fowler assert, “this could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur.” 

In other words, crowdsourcing could become a little less crowded.

We’ve examined the face that crowdsourcing can assume, and the caveats it poses (particularly when considered to be a flawless creative driver).  Angwin and Fowler explore the challenges Wikipedia has endured, such as waves of excessive participant skepticism and content policing, and other issues such as content filtering and source confirming it still must overcome.

I think insularity is at the heart of Wikipedia’s declining appeal.  Several sources in the WSJ cite Wikipedia-ites' unique collective language and code of conduct as causes of the decline in user activity.  But other forums like Twitter and Facebook and the general blogger community also exhibit unique lexicons and cultures as well (i.e. Retweets, blog reposting etiquette, etc.) and still are growing user base.   

What’s interesting is that Wikipedia - past, present, and by all indications, future - does not enable sharing across forums.  It doesn’t sync with news sources nor does it enable quick–sharing across social networks, which stands in complete contradiction to the rapid increase in collaboration currently occuring.  Everything is feeding into everything else, and I would argue that Wikipedia’s appeal is dwindling as a participatory environemt because it hasn’t jumped on that bandwagon yet.

Allow people can tweet their recently-edited articles.  Enable editors to ask a Facebook friend to co-post/edit an article.  Perhaps this small step in the social-networking direction could help Wikipedia stave off its popularity decline.

Filed under: Emerging Media, News