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Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia "lost" 49,000 of its volunteer editors in the first three months of 2009, University research suggests.The figure compares with a loss of 4,900 over the same period in 2008.
The research was carried out by Felipe Ortega, from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.Mr Ortega said that if the downward trend continued it could spell problems for the site.
"If the negative trend is maintained for too much time, say one or two years, eventually the project could enter a problematic phase," he said.
"I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."
Valleywag ran a write-up of the top-end structure of Wikipedia back in Jan. Keeping in mind that it's from Gawker, I think it provides something of a window into the top of the organization.
[valleywag.gawker.com...]
My account keeps being timed out - they only give you about 3 months since the last edit so every time I want to make an edit I have to reapply.
This 5 facts definetly will keep them growing:
[wikimediafoundation.org...]
Note the sentence in bold fonts and buttons in red colors :)
