by Gregory Kohs

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At the beginning of 2012, Sue Gardner, the woman in charge of the organization that hosts Wikipedia, caused quite a tech media stir when she rolled out a chart that actually had been sitting around for months. The line graph depicted a trend of declining active Wikipedia editors that suggested the English-language encyclopedia would never again see as many editors working away on it as were seen in March 2007. It has been a downhill pattern ever since then. Many of the Wikipedia faithful, adept at mindlessly deflecting criticism, said not to worry as long as there were more and more people visiting the site, it didn’t matter if fewer were choosing to edit the content they found. And besides, other language Wikipedias were supposedly going to take up the global editor slack being let out by the English version of Wikipedia.

Now, two years after Gardner revealed the “holy shit” slide (as she called it) documenting editor loss, Wikipedia is finally losing its readers, as well. Wikipedia analyst Andreas Kolbe broke the news on Wikipediocracy.com on Saturday, January 4th, revealing a series of alarming graphs that unmistakably show that Wikipedia ended 2013 with far fewer page views than it began the year. And not just on the English Wikipedia; the same disappointing pattern was found on the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and other language versions of Wikipedia.

What could explain this decline in viewership of the Wikipedia.org sites? Are readers getting fed up with the unrelenting fundraiser drives that make us feel guilty for not donating to a $50 million, organizationally bloated Wikimedia Foundation budget? Or have readers been shamed into finding more reliable sources that

…continue reading Google’s Knowledge Graph Boxes: killing Wikipedia?