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ShareLondon: Wikipedia has disputed claims that a huge number of its editors, who help maintain the online encyclopaedia, have walked out.
It had been reported on November 26 that ten times more editors had left Wikipedia in early 2009 than during the same period in 2008.
But the team overseeing the reference work has said the claims on losses were not accurate, blaming a difference in what counts as an "editor", and it said that in contrast the number of people editing Wikipedia was stable.
In a blog post the Wikimedia Foundation responded to the publication of a report by researcher Felipe Ortega which said that 49,000 editors had departed Wikipedia in the first three months of 2009.
Ortega's comparisons suggest that only about 4,900 left the site in the first few months of 2008.
Wikipedia relies on editors to keep the online reference work up to date, expand entries and make corrections.
Erik Moeller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Erik Zachte, one of its data analysts, said that while Ortega's article comprehensively described the challenges and opportunities facing Wikipedia it mischaracterized the changes in its editing population.
The pair wrote in the blog that the numbers of people contributing to Wikipedia hit a high in early 2007, declined slightly and have since stabilised.
"Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people," the BBC quoted them as writing.
The confusion arose over the differing definitions of what constitutes an editor.
Ortega counted everyone who made one change as an editor giving a total population of three million people.
By contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation counts only people who make five edits or more as an editor.
This gives an editing population of about one million people across all languages. Of that total, the English edition of Wikipedia has about 40,000 editors.
The pair also disputed Ortega's attempt to measure when Wikipedia editors start and stop.
"It's impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving," they stated in the blog.
The Wikimedia Foundation said it was continuing to work with Ortega to iron out some of the methodological difficulties and uncover long term editing trends.
