If you love Wikipedia and you’ve always wanted to contribute by creating new pages or helping to edit existing ones, but found the process to daunting and decided to give it up – you’re not alone. But it looks like all that is going to change in the future. It has been reported that Wikipedia is in the process of developing a simple, easy-to-use editor that will make it easier to make changes to “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. It looks like recent reports of the encyclopedia’s declining number of editors have spurred Wikipedia into making its editing tools more accessible to the masses.
While the number of editors may have dropped, page views still remain at a healthy 7.5 billion per month – so while the site is still being used, it looks like less people are editing it or adding new pages to the site. The introduction of these new tools will probably help introduce a new generation of editors, but at what cost?
One of the reasons that Wikipedia maintained a certain standard to its articles was its learning curve. People who just wanted to much about the encyclopedia wouldn’t be bothered to learn the how to edit the pages (commands, format etc) and will just give up, leaving the editing to the people who actually cared. Will these new tools lead to more useless pages and errors? Or will pranksters leave Wikipedia alone and bother sites like Uncyclopedia instead? Only time will tell. The new Wikipedia editor will be introduced next June.
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