Wikipedia Woos Users as Interest Wanes

Wikipedia has grown from 100,000 topic pages in 2003 to over 15 million today, and remains an iconic Internet brand as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

According to Newsweek, thousands of volunteer editors have logged off, along with users. What was once a pioneering Web 2.0 social movement is in serious trouble, the also-struggling Newsweek notes in a blog posted titled "Take This Blog and Shove It!"

A spokesperson tells Newsweek that user activity on the crowdsourced site has stagnated. Reasons for the drop-off in interest include the fact that the site is virtually complete; overly-aggressive editors are off-putting to the casual user; its interface isn't that user-friendly; and its plethora of anti-vandalism rules are complicated and intimidating.

An even bigger reason, however, is that most people do not want to work for free, even if they are contributing to “the sum of all human knowledge,” as Newsweek puts it.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the site's owner, is partnering with eight professors at schools including George Washington and Princeton to integrate Wikipedia into public-policy curricula.

While its lack of academic or editorially verified editors means it won't become the C-SPAN of the Internet, Wikipedia is hoping that “campus ambassadors” will offer in-class training on editing the site and begin recruiting students to write and edit content as part of their coursework

As the web has matured, the ration of input to engagement has increased, and consumer’s expectation of the value-add has skyrocketed proportionately. Social media platforms such as Facebook with 500 million users, Flickr with 4 billion photos and YouTube with 2 billion views per day – are all proof of that equation.

The distant echoes of early communal Internet fever have been replaced by the cacophony of personally driven digital dialogue. Professional blogger are replacing amateur bloggers, and microblogging, epitomized by Twitter, is in vogue. That said, according to recent Nielsen research, 60-70% of users who sign up on Twitter leave within one month.

As the emergent model of citizen journalism stabilizes, websites dependent on unpaid labor are struggling. “You’re taking a limited resource—people—and spreading it over a much wider set of opportunities. It changes the playing field,” says Cliff Lampe, Michigan State University professor.

Wikipedia’s efforts to keep pace with global web growth include the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge whose goal is to reward contributors of Swahili-language entries with opportunities to win modems, cell phones and laptops. It proved effective.

As Jeff Howe wrote four years ago in his landmark book on crowdsourcing, success in social media will come to “those that figure out a formula for making their users feel amply compensated.”

As the not-for-profit Wikipedia seeks to grow, it needs to figure out how to amply compensate its community.

Separately, Wikia — a commercial business cofounded by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales — is looking to build up its partnerships with brands by opening an office in London in order to attract European brands to its fold.

Richard Yu, Wikia's European sales director, tells Brand Republic it's entering the European market due to the success of the site in the US.

Yu says that Wikia is getting more than 900 million page views and recently broke the 31 million unique users a month benchmark: "Users are engaging with the brand because the average user stays on the site for about 10 minutes and the click through rate is much higher with our audience rather than non user generated sight models."

According to Brand Republic, Wikia is talking to Microsoft, Sony and EA, "its largest investors in the US," and will offer European brands "traditional advertising such as rich media and video links on the site, as well as in-content branding and custom Wikia pages."

Also, while Wikia largely works with entertainment brands in the US, "it will be looking to work with sports brands in the lead-up to the London Olympics."

(Note: this article has been corrected to reflect the difference between Wikipedia and Wikia; thanks to our eagle-eyed readers for flagging the distinction).