Wikipedia’s Call For Help: More Editors

Wikipedia is in dire times right now as they observe a decline in editors and admins count in recent years and it continues to plummet down at an alarming rate.

As we all know, the site is part of the non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation who has successfully kept the site not only reliable but also ad-free ever since it started. For the longest time, volunteer contributors, editors and admins have collaborated to make this site one of the most trusted site.

However in recent year, the more than a decade old multilingual online encyclopedia has seen a steady decline active volunteer editors (> 5 edits a month) to keep the site running like clockwork. From five years back, the more than 50’000 editors have shrunk down by 40% this year. Here’s a graphical representation of that.

To make things worse, their current active editors seemed to have shied away from taking it to the next level by applying for Adminship. With this decrease in number of fresh editors, Wikipedia’s current undertaking won’t change any time soon.

In an attempt to salvage the situation, a Wikimania event was held and attended by Georgia Washington University student last week. In addition, Wikimedia is brewing a beta-testing of WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) which ideally should encourage more prospective contributors by making editing easier for them. Another plan that they’re working on is minor overhaul on the page aimed at educating/reminding its visitors of the site’s greatest feature other than giving information about almost anything you can think of: Having the capability to EDIT articles.

Seeing them struggling (although not that grave) for volunteer contributors is a bit saddening especially considering how big of a help they’ve been for each of us. Well we hope that things work out for Wikipedia and the people involved in the organization.

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