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There is a benign explanation for Wikipedia's slackening pace: the site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world's species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else - well, what more could they expect you to add? So the only stuff left is esoteric, and it attracts fewer participants because the only editing jobs left are "janitorial" - making sure that articles are well formatted and readable...
...emotion. "There's the rush of joy that you get the first time you make an edit to Wikipedia, and you realize that 330 million people are seeing it live," says Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation's executive director. In Wikipedia's early days, every new addition to the site had a roughly equal chance of surviving editors' scrutiny. Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by élite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your edits to stick, you've got to learn...
...foundation has been working to address some of these issues; for example, it is improving the site's antiquated, often incomprehensible editing interface. But as for the larger issue of trying to attract a more diverse constituency, it has no specific plan - only a goal. "The average Wikipedian is a young man in a wealthy country who's probably a grad student - somebody who's smart, literate, engaged in the world of ideas, thinking, learning, writing all the time," Gardner says. Those people are invaluable, she notes, but the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women...
...voice their opinion and be a part of the budget cut process. Many were quick to criticize the University on the lack of transparency in their decision-making process when it announced its first round of cuts. The Idea Bank is a great opportunity to remedy this. The site makes it very easy for users to contribute, as it is well-designed and simple to use. Ideas can be posted anonymously, and viewers can then rate each idea on a 1-to-5 star scale. Users can even comment on posted ideas and offer their feedback...
Facing a $110 million dollar budget deficit over the next two years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has unrolled a new online “Idea Bank” Web site that allows students, faculty, and staff to share anonymous proposals about ways to reduce expenses...