From Marketplace Tech Report, from American Public Media
By Adriene Hill
Chances are you'll go to Wikipedia to look something up today. But the number of people writing those articles is falling, according to company founder Jimmy Wales. At the annual Wikipedia conference this week, Wales told the Associated Press that the "typical contributor to the site is a '26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website."
Stuart Geiger, who's a Ph.D. student at [the School of Information at] Berkeley and a Wikipedia researcher, says attracting new members can be hard. "On the technical side of things, the interface is actually very difficult to use," Geiger says. "If you go to any Wikipedia article, click edit, not going to get same interface as you get with blogging software or email or Facebook; you get Wiki markup, where you have to write code in specialized computer language."
Geiger says contributors also need more positive feedback. As the organization has focused more on quality, contributions have become more likely to be rejected by Wikipedia editors. Geiger says the rejection can be enough of a blow to keep people away from future contributions....