Wikipedia’s plan to stop the spinners

WIKIPEDIA is to boost its dwindling ranks of volunteer editors to ensure that it can neutralise public relations spin, the founder of the online encyclopaedia says.

Jimmy Wales said he was ‘‘definitely not going to let Wikipedia become a PR platform’’, because it would be ‘‘so against all of our values’’. Wikipedia relies on tens of thousands of volunteers to edit its millions of articles and create new ones. However, the number of active editors on the English version has fallen to about 30,000, after hitting a peak of 55,000 in 2007. Over the same period, the number of articles on English Wikipedia has almost tripled to more than 4.5 million.

As their numbers have fallen, volunteer editors have complained that an increasing amount of their time is spent fighting surreptitious alterations made on behalf of governments, companies, celebrities and powerful individuals.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, will try to attract volunteers by making the site easier to edit.

Its existing editing suite has been criticised as overly complex and unattractive to lay users, because it requires them to learn a basic code. It was designed for desktop and laptop computers and can be hard to use on mobiles.

The foundation is to introduce new tools for editing on mobile devices.

Wales said better mobile editing would help to attract volunteers from developing nations, where most people use smartphones to access the internet.

Wales said the decline in volunteer editors was an important matter but ‘‘not a crisis’’.

He said Wikipedia was ‘‘decisively winning the battle’’ against editors who were paid to make changes.

In 2011 Wales accused public relations firm Bell Pottinger of ‘‘ethical blindness’’ after the firm admitted making hundreds of secret alterations to improve clients’ Wikipedia profiles.

Jimmy Wales