In a recent feature article titled “The decline of Wikipedia – Even as more people than ever rely on it, fewer people create it”, MIT Technology review expresses the concerns about Wikipedia’s editing process that many of us have had for some years now … the editing process makes it difficult to attract new editors, and different points of view to the encyclopedia. Many articles end up with a slant of preference: The personal (or professional) one of a senior editor, enforced through a bureaucratic process. There are efforts to remedy the situation and attract new editors, but the real challenge seems to be how to get political influence out of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
In response, the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path…
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/