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“Wikipedia approaches its limits,” ran a striking August 2009 headline in the usually sober Guardian.
With infinite storage and lots of free labor, the very notion of “limits” seems misplaced. However, the limits alluded to in the Guardian are more editorial than logistical. The low-hanging fruit is disappearing—Wikipedians can write only so many biographies of Seinfeld characters—and getting new content onto the site is not as easy as it used to be. A recent study by Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) found that Wikipedia’s key growth indicators—the number of new pages and new editors—have floundered for the past two years, while coordination and editing costs have ratcheted up. Today’s Wikipedians waste a growing portion of their editing time on bureaucratic infighting rather than creating new content. According to the PARC study, Wikipedians also exhibit increasing resistance to new content, especially that contributed by occasional editors.
Some of these concerns were predictable. The sum of human knowledge is expanding but still finite; tools to curate it are improving but still imperfect. As Wikipedia has accumulated a wealth of data—its English version contains more than three million articles—opportunities for making novel contributions have diminished. Wikipedia was bound to hit a knowledge constraint at some point, and it may have already done so. The PARC study suggests that article growth peaked in 2007-2008 and has been declining since.
Some obstacles to continued evolution are fundamental. The set of practices operative on Wikipedia is very loosely defined, which was a boon to early growth but is perhaps now an impediment. When Wales and Sanger started the site, they aspired to create a modern encyclopedia that would continue the tradition of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Encyclopedia Britannica. “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” became one of the defining principles of the project; eventually it also led to numerous squabbles over what exactly a digital encyclopedia should be. Adhering to the spirit of Diderot and Britannica’s authors required establishing a certain threshold of importance that encyclopedia articles needed to pass. Paper publishers had fixed numbers of pages to work with and had to compromise. With server space cheap, Wikipedia did not face the same challenges. Some Wikipedians—now known as “inclusionists”—viewed this lack of physical constraint as an opportunity. Others—“deletionists”—thought that filling the infinite space with trivia would distract Wikipedians from curating information that truly matters and dilute Wikipedia’s credentials as a reference resource.