Wikipedia denies losing editors

BANGALORE, INDIA: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, countered the authenticity of the recent study which claimed that 49,000 volunteer editors of the online encyclopaedia have left in the first three months of 2009.

In the first three months of 2009, the eight-year old English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, ten times compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega.

The findings of the research had prompted many to question whether this is the beginning of the end for the world’s largest encyclopedia.

However, Wales said he didn’t accept the research as new editors are replacing existing editors at nearly the same pace.

“Our internal numbers don’t confirm all the claims made. We do agree that the number of editors has stabilized, as one would expect, since we're already the fifth most popular website on the Internet,” he said in an interview given to The Telegraph newspaper from London.

“ our own data shows that the number of active editors across all projects is stable – i.e. the new editors are replaced at about the same pace as existing editors are leaving,” he said.

According to Wikipedia’s statistics, there were 39,211 Wikipedians – people who write and edit pages on the site – in September 2009 who contributed more than five times to the English-language version of the site during that month he said.

This is compared to 40,793 Wikipedians who contributed the same amount to the English Wikipedia in September 2008 – which is a year on year decline of 1,585.

The site had come under fire recently when it announced new measures which would enable a core group of volunteer editors to adjudicate on any changes made to a living person's Wikipedia before those modifications were published.

Wales said these new measures, known as “flagged revisions", which are set to be adopted in December, were designed to combat the growing problem of vandalism on the site. He also denied there had been any “material changes” to the editing rules, according to the report.