• WSJ, Monday, November 23, 2009 2:35 PM

Putting the sustainability of "crowdsourced" Web endeavors into question, the Wall Street Journal reports that many of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police Wikipedia.rog are quitting.

As the Journal explains, the trend "could have significant implications for the brand of democratization that Wikipedia helped to unleash over the Internet -- the empowerment of the amateur."

Still, Wikipedia is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors, and new members continue to join the project that bills itself as a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Also, volunteers have recently been departing at a faster rate, while the net losses have accelerated over the past year.

As the Journal reports, the stress involved in maintaining the endeavor is enormous. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again," Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega tells the paper.

Read the whole story at WSJ »