Wikipedia has been loosing editors at an alarming rate in recent months, reports the Wall Street Journal. In the first three months of this present year, Wikipedia lost 49 000 English-language editors, as compared to the 4 900 they lost during the same time frame the previous year. This has caused many to raise concern for the future of the fifth most-popular website on the Internet.

Roughly 325million people visit the online-encyclopaedia each month. Despite the drop in editors, the site traffic has grown considerably- traffic went up by 20 percent between September 2008 and 2009. So what's the rub? Is Wikipedia just out of things to write about?

Not according to founder Jimmy Wales, who founded the site in 2001 after running into too much red tape to produce a typical encyclopaedia. He tells the WSJ that he is now more concerned with ensuring the quality of existing articles than with creating infinite entries with no use. Another of his top priorities is to ensure the accuracy of all new edits done to the site as well to make Wikipedia easier to use for new members.

"If people think Wikipedia is done," or out of new things to write about, "that's substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem," says Wales.

All of this has implications for the field of journalism.

When David Rhode was kidnapped in Afghanistan last November, the campaign by The New York Times to keep his kidnapping from entering public knowledge, and thus risking his safety, was aided by Wikipedia. The encyclopaedia instituted a freeze on his page, which forbids anyone from updating the page with news of his disappearance. This action helped to keep the story under the radar and was a contributing factor to Rhode's safe return home.

On a less positive note, many journalists have been exposed as having used Wikipedia for information for their stories- without fact checking the gathered information. This was true when Shane Fitzgerald, an Irish student, saw a fake statement he'd imbedded in Maurice Jarre's page shortly after the French composer's death show up in many major newspapers.

Fitzgerald had the intention " to show that journalists use Wikipedia as a primary source and to demonstrate the power the Internet has over newspaper reporting," he told the Colombia Journalism Review.

His experiment proved to be very successful: the quotation appeared in newspapers in the UK, the US, India, and Australia. This makes a strong point for journalists everywhere. Only verified sources should be used in stories, regardless of how uncontroversial the information may be.

The drop in editors only solidifies this sentiment. If there are fewer editors, there are less people to verify the information, less people likely to be experts in the edited entry. Journalists must be careful with sources, and Wikipedia is no exception.

Sources: Wall Street Journal, Colombia Journalism Review