Wikipedia is Losing Editors

Wikipedia has continuously been losing authors in recent years. 2007 was the record year for the online encyclopedia, with more than 85,000 active editors. By 2012, that number had dropped to about 75,500.

A recent study by the University of Minnesota is blaming the implementation of new rules for the decline. Specifically, it states that "restrictive quality control mechanisms" and specific algorithms for testing texts have ensured that new writers do not remain long. New users are especially deterred when their contributions are being deleted.

However, the productivity of active Wikipedians remains high. Despite a decline in authors, an average of 9,000 new articles were created each day in 2011 and 2012, far more than in previous years. Overall, Wikipedia contains almost 24 million articles. The leading Wikipedia categorised by language is the English site with 4.1 million articles, followed by the German with 1.5 million and the French with 1.3 million articles respectively.