Wikipedia says it's losing contributors

Wikipedia's worst fault is that ANYONE can put ANYTHING on that site. It is NOT difficult to edit an article at all.

A lot of good information is mixed in what a lot of pure crap. The problem is, the public doesn't know the difference between truth and fiction.

The "26-year old geeky males" are now all either (a) extremely overworked in their post-downsizing IT support jobs and have not got the time to volunteer for wiki, or (b) their job got outsourced to China, so they are sullen and unemployed or working in fast food.

The biggest problem with wikipedia is the same problem as any discussion forum, to include this one, opinion. People post things from a certain point of view in order to support their personal opinions on matters, sometime regardless of the fact involved.

So again 'the neutrality of this article is disputed and also 'the following section doesn't cite any sources. This is the norm on the internet, If you plan to research something don't use a limited number of sources.

This doesn't detract from the usefulness of Wikipedia, or other opinion based forums, a rounded opinion cannot be formed when learning from only one angle. This is how life is, people are controlled this way regularly. A wise person will withhold judgement until enough data is gathered to make a proper decision. Even then one must be open to new information, even if it forces a major shift in the perception held by the individual.

I am living on a tiny savings. The biggest cash donation I made in recent years ($20) went to Wikipedia to express my appreciation toward it.
To me, Wikipedia's merit is in that it touches almost everything, and provides entrant-level descriptive information about them. From there I can go further to more specialized / professional sources if I do need more accuracy and details. But in most cases, Wikipedia seems already good enough to me.

I used to do a lot of editing on wp; though I am a geek I am well over 26. But it became very tiresome, and I rarely do anything any more. There are too many overeager, overzealous people who revert and amend anything you say, and even if your point of view is correct it generally takes a long heated argument to 'win' in the end, and someone's feelings always wind up getting hurt.

Several years ago I spent a fair amount of time, over the course of several days, improving the entry on "soldering", which is a specialty of mine since I am an Electronics Engineer, talented and well-educated in the subject. I took it from a neglected, poorly maintained entry to a reasonably encyclopedic, pretty well written entry -- not ready for featured status or anything, but if you needed information on soldering it was all there.

But I got tired of 'defending' my edits, I've left the entry alone for quite a while now, and without my input it's degenerated quite a bit. It's overly wordy, with lots of random and irrelevant stuff in it, inaccurate information, and overall it's not as useful as it once was. Without an expert like myself it's become less than it was....and I'm not going to police it any more, I'm just tired of it.

We'll you Tech guys have conditioned a whole generation (s) to expect FREE!! . . . if you don't provide it they will go elsewhere.

Wikipedia has contributed one of the largest centralized knowledge bases of information in the history of mankind and it's detractors have done nothing. I can't overstate how much I personally have benefitted from it much less billions of other people around the globe.

Yeah try to use Wikipedia as a source in a college paper an see where it gets you. For a company that claims it is just as accurate as any other encyclopedia, they don't understand that you can cite Encyclopedias when writing, but not Wikipedia.

It isn't wikipedia's fault that the world is overloaded with smart arsed degenerates who are total imbeciles who take pleasure in crapping over everything they see

The contributers sometimes wrote things on the website that are not even true.

There's a good reason why this is happening. Wikipedia won't allow many legitimate entries to be posted. Last year I created a page about a non-profit collectors organization that serves a certain area of the East Coast. Wikipedia's stupid editors kept deleting my page, saying it was too much of an advertisement or something like that. There was nothing advertorial about the page. Our club doesn't make a profit and the page I created was an information page that detailed a group that has been serving the community for more than 50 years. So Wikipedia, before you go complaining, don't blame anyone but yourself!!!

Wikipedia is quite politically biased and is very much controlled by a small group of individuals who get their opinion printed as fact.

wikiidia is not a reliable source

They are controlled by corporations who hire individuals to post corporate trash as fact. To heck with Wikipedia. Check out the trash about aspartame as a for instance......

It is noteworthy that virtually all of the editors wishing to see fair and balanced treatment of articles concerned with frontier subjects have been driven off by the skeptical editors. This has resulted in a decidedly mainstream representation of subjects like energy healing and what the skeptics call "pseudoscience." Readers should always read the history and talk pages to see how stable the article is. Even then, only use Wikipedia as a study guide. After all, that science article may have been written by a ten-year old hiding behind a screen name while doing a homework assignment.

Making fun of wikipedia is very up-to-dated

They deserve to go under. From insisting that the name of the emperoro of Japan in World War II is NOT Hirohito to insiting that the name of the king on Shakespeare's play Macbeth is NOT Macbeth...well, you can see what I mean. The "editors" are twits, and this guy is looking to add 5,000 more to his ranks.

I use Wikipedia a lot. Couple months ago I looked around to find an address where
I could send a contribution. Never did find one.

Also tried to add something to an article once, but couldn't figure out how to do it.
But then, I wasn't born in the computer age. When I was born we didn't have
ball point pens.

I had cataract surgery oin 2006, and had a new IOL (artificial lens) implanted. Older implants would not focus, but the new (FDA approved in 2003) accomodating lens (a device, unlike older ones) gives me better than 20/20 vision at all distances after wearing thick glasses all my life (although my results are atypical, most get vision between 20/20 and 20/25). I added information about this new device to the article on cataract surgery, and it was edited out after less than a day; my guess is by one of the companies competing with its manufacturer edited it out. That was the last time I triued editing Wikipedia.

And Wales can't figure out why people won't contribute?

I tried to add extra info missing from a page (just more technical mumbo jumbo) about a now dead company and I used to work there but the info was deleted even though it was neutral.

I stopped visiting wikipedia after that.