A sharp drop in Wikipedians, the volunteers who write and edit the online encyclopedia, is a disturbing and inevitable trend, the Toronto man who was once its top contributor said Monday.”Losing volunteers is a sign that things could be better at Wikipedia,” Simon Pulsifer said from his full-time job at a software company. “My main interest is in writing new content. Doing that is a lot more difficult nowadays.”
via Wikipedia’s entries turning into exits – thestar.com.
I must admit my own enthusasm for Wikipedia dropped of a couple years ago. After been a regular contributor I became a little peeved with the ‘rules’ that were being enforced. I think Wikipedia will always be a pre-emminent information source on the web. It certaininly is user-driven content but not a real community which I think limits collaboration.
That could be because we’ve reached the point of documenting much of what can be documented……..we’re now in the editting phase and creating the up & coming entries.
but yes, the hype of creating & maintaining Wikipedia entries has died down. This was to be expected at the point of reaching “critical mass” so-to-speak.
Similar post at BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8379566.stm