It’s not easy to edit Wikipedia with the smartphone technology many now use to consume it. This has huge implications for the quality of the online encyclopedia

Wikipedia is threatened: will the site survive, asks an alarmist piece in the New York Times. The problem is technological obsolescence: Wikipedia is getting nearly as old-fashioned as email.

The number of people who edit Wikipedia has been declining steadily since 2005, even as the site has become more established, richer, and indispensable to almost everyone online. There are well-known social reasons for this: editing Wikipedia requires you to learn a simple markup language, while defending edits requires an almost unlimited tolerance for argument and friction, and progress through a largely self-appointed bureaucracy.

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Wikipedia editing requires even greater motivation. The people who gain most are almost always the charlatans and liars