Tom Simonite sees the online encyclopedia getting sclerotic:
The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia – and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation – as shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. … The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.
But he acknowledges that the decline of participation is largely due to the anti-vandalism measures introduced in 2007, when high-profile hoaxes seemed to pose an existential threat to the project:
The project’s most active volunteers introduced a raft of new editing tools and bureaucratic procedures intended to combat the bad edits. They created software that allowed fellow editors to quickly survey recent changes and reject them or admonish their authors with a single mouse click. They set loose automated “bots” that could reverse any incorrectly formatted changes or those that were likely to be vandalism and dispatch warning messages to the offending editors.
The tough new measures worked. Vandalism was brought under control, and hoaxes and scandals became less common. … But those tougher rules and the more suspicious atmosphere that came along with them had an unintended consequence. Newcomers to Wikipedia making their first, tentative edits – and the inevitable mistakes – became less likely to stick around. Being steamrollered by the newly efficient, impersonal editing machine was no fun. The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000 and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer, only 31,000 people could be considered active editors.
The Dish 