Wikipedia Denies it is Losing Editors

A recent research published by Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid has shown that almost 50,000 editors left Wikipedia in the first quarter of this year. Wikipedia is considered the fifth most popular web site in the world with more than 344 million unique visitors last month.

The research tried to find the reasons for the large desertions and suggested that editors feel exasperated when asked to debate the content of articles time and time again, in addition to the now-tighter rules on who can edit Wikipedia pages.

Wikipedia claimed that the numbers of the report are not accurate since they are showing when an individual Wikipedia editor starts editing and when he stops. "It is impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again. There are methodological challenges with determining the long-term trend of joining and leaving," said the Wikimedia foundation in its the last blog post.

"Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak two and a half years ago, and has remained stable since then."

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director of Wikimedia, assured that the number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. "There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day."