Wikipedia – have the deletionists won?
Jinfo Blog

22nd August 2009

By Penny Crossland

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The recent news that Wikipedia’s English-language site was about to reach the 3 million article mark has renewed the debate as to whether the online encyclopedia has reached its limits. Despite being one of the biggest open repositories of knowledge - and growing - research published by the Guardian (http://digbig.com/5baewd) reveals that the number of articles being added to the Wikipedia site per day has reduced considerably – from around 2,200 in July 2007 to an average of 1,300 today. Moreover, while the number of contributors has increased by 61% in the last two years (around 500,000), the core of very active editors has remained static. Interestingly, the authors of the research , based at the Palo Alto Research Centre concluded that there is an ’inner core’ of editors whose contributions are less likely to be overturned than those of the occasional editor. All this has re-opened the debate between the ‘deletionists’, who want to avoid Wikipedia becoming a ‘junkyard’ and argue for well-written and tightly-controlled contributions, versus the ‘inclusionists’, who are more concerned with the amount of knowledge on the site and the spirit of participation and community that that engenders. (http://digbig.com/5baewe) The Palo Alto research seems to indicate that the ‘deletionists’ have won the argument. From an infopro’s perspective, that is probably not a bad thing. We are always searching for easy-to-find, accurate data and Wikipedia cannot always be relied upon to deliver the latter. If more articles that are deemed inaccurate are deleted from the site, surely we are more likely to visit it?

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