Predictions of the end of Wikipedia

Some critics cite specific hoaxes, errors, propaganda and other poor content, and assert that the lack of good content will lead to people finding better content elsewhere.[5][6]

Wikipedia is crowdsourced by a few million volunteer editors. Tens of thousands contribute the majority of contents, and several thousand do quality control and maintenance work. As the encyclopedia expanded in the 2010s, the number of active editors did not steadily grow and sometimes declined. Various sources have predicted that Wikipedia will eventually have too few editors to be functional and collapse due to lack of participation.[5][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Wikipedia has a few thousand volunteer administrators who perform various functions, including functions similar to those carried out by a forum moderator. Critics have described their actions as harsh, bureaucratic, biased, unfair, or capricious, and predicted that the resulting outrage will lead to the site's closure.[5][13][14] Some such critics are aware of the duties of administrators; others merely assume they govern the site.

Various 2012 articles reported that a decline in English Wikipedia's recruitment of new administrators could end Wikipedia.[15][16]

Others suggest that the unwarranted deletion of useful articles from Wikipedia may portend its end. That brought about the creation of Deletionpedia — which itself ceased to exist – with its contents consigned into the web archive.[17]

Decline in editors

English Wikipedia editors with >100 edits per month[18]

A 2014 trend analysis published in The Economist stated that "The number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years."[19] The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was described by The Economist as substantially higher than in other languages (non-English Wikipedias). It reported that in other languages, the number of "active editors" (those with at least five edits per month) has been relatively constant since 2008: some 42,000 editors, with narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down.

In the English Wikipedia, the number of active editors peaked in 2007 at about 50,000 editors, and fell to 30,000 editors in 2014.[19] A linear decline at this rate would leave no active editors of English Wikipedia in eleven years.

Given that the trend analysis published in The Economist presents the number of active editors for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) as remaining relatively constant, sustaining their numbers at approximately 42,000 active editors, the contrast has pointed to the effectiveness of Wikipedia in those languages to retain their active editors on a renewable and sustained basis.[19] Though different language versions of Wikipedia have different policies, no comment identified a particular policy difference as potentially making a difference in the rate of editor attrition for English Wikipedia.[20] Editor count showed a slight uptick a year later, and no clear trend after that.

Andrew Lih and Andrew Brown both maintain editing Wikipedia with smartphones is difficult and discourages new potential contributors.[7][10] In a 2013 article, Tom Simonite of MIT Technology Review said that for several years running the number of Wikipedia editors had been falling and claimed the bureaucratic structure and rules are a factor in this. Simonite alleged that some Wikipedians use the labyrinthine rules and guidelines to dominate others and have a vested interest in keeping the status quo.[21] Lih alleges there is serious disagreement among existing contributors how to resolve this. Lih fears for Wikipedia's long-term future while Brown fears problems with Wikipedia will remain and rival encyclopedias will not replace it.[7][10]

As of 2015, there had been a marked decline in persons who viewed Wikipedia from their computers. Increased use of phones was viewed as a threat, at least to fundraising. At the time, the Wikimedia Foundation reported reserves equivalent to one year's budgeted expenditures. On the other hand, the number of paid staff had ballooned, so that expenses increased.[22]

Automated editing has grown over the years, and in some languages many articles have been created automatically. Some scholars theorize that artificial intelligence and computers could do the work of article research and creation.[23] As their study concludes:

"We have shown that generating Wikipedia can be approached as a multi-document summarization problem with a large, parallel dataset, and demonstrated a two-stage extractive-abstractive framework for carrying it out. The coarse extraction method used in the first stage appears to have a significant effect on final performance, suggesting further research on improving it would be fruitful. We introduce a new, decoder-only sequence transduction model for the abstractive stage, capable of handling very long input-output examples. This model significantly outperforms traditional encoderdecoder architectures on long sequences, allowing us to condition on many reference documents and to generate coherent and informative Wikipedia articles."[23]

• Criticism of Wikipedia
• Predictions of Facebook's end
• Predictions of Google's end
• Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Scam warning, involving paid scammers who claim to create and protect Wikipedia articles.
• Wikipedia:The end of Wikipedia, a humorous essay
• Wikipedia Zero operated from 2012 to 2018.[24]

• WP:THREATENING2MEN Peake, Bryce (2015). "WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia". Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. doi:10.7264/N3TH8JZS.