Note: If you go to the article on the WSJ site you only receive a snippet of this article. However, if you use Google you can access the complete article via Google's "first click free" program. So, run this search and then click on the result. There is full text.
From the Article:
Volunteers have been departing 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 over the past year. 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, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.
[Snip]
"Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment," contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."
Gardner:
“The smart geeks are always going to be the heart and soul of what we do. But… the goal is to make the whole editing system more user-friendly so we’re not excluding the people who aren’t as tech-centric as our core community.”
Jimmy Wales:
1) This small group mentality can be a blessing when editing articles but it is also one of the site’s biggest weaknesses: Wikipedia’s pool of contributors can tend towards the homogenous – or “a certain type of person”, in Wales’ words.
2) “Right now a lot of the Wikipedia editing is done by people who are very technologically savvy,” he says. “What we see is 20s and 30s computer geeks, mostly male – tragically 85 per cent male.
+ The article does mention the Wikipedia Academy that took place at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Here's a link to what we posted at that time.
+ Finally, ResourceShelf has wondered aloud for years what would happen if Wikipedians and others would leave the project and move on to some else. Here's an example from June 17, 2006.
Specifically, here's what we wrote in the June, 2006 post:
The bottom line for us about Wikipedia will not be coming today, tomorrow, or even next year, but in 4 or 5 years. Will volunteers stay with it? Will material be as closely watched as some of it is now? We remember another volunteer-based effort to help organize web sites, The Open Directory, and to put it mildly, DMOZ did not turn out to be what many had hoped for. It’s human nature. People are often ready to move on to the next big thing, especially when they volunteer. If that happens, will Wikipedia be able to maintain the more than one million (and by that time many many more) entries?
One thing we did not mention is the hostile environment that Felipe Ortega discusses.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
