Is charm of Wikipedia on the wane?

It can be said with conviction, no netizen is yet to learn of Wikipedia. It will be wrong to state
Wikipedia.org as a globally acclaimed site simply; apart from this, as per several studies, it is the also fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with about 325 million monthly visitors. However, even after all these, the website is coming across problems increasingly and the most potent of these happen to be the horrific reality that millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are relinquishing. Is Wikipedia losing its charm then? This happens to be one of the big questions in the worldwide tech industry.

But this is not the single threat. If you recall, Wikipedia was the first to set out the brand of democratization in the world of internet, it relates to the empowerment of the amateur and any loss of Wikipedia may bring this novel concept almost to a standstill.

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The subject is quite interesting and hence, there has been a series of studies. As indicated by these studies, volunteers have been quitting the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated in excess of the past year. In accordance with Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, instrumental in analyzing Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages, in the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier.

All these indicate that Wikipedia is in a serious problem than ever before and the encyclopedia's endeavors to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy is completely at stake. Many, in the meantime, have also started affirming that errors and intentional insertions of false information by vandals have subverted its reliability. Nevertheless, executives at the Wikimedia Foundation are confident that they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors.