Going by a Monday report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the Internet-specific democratization branding of Wikipedia. org, the world’s fifth-ranking Web site in terms of popularity, may suffer a setback, as an unprecedented number of volunteers are reportedly taking the ‘exit’ route!

The Wikipedia site, boasting nearly 325 million monthly visitors, owes its momentous growth during this decade to its online volunteers who write, edit, and check its entries. However, there has of late been a disquieting increase in the number of volunteers quitting Wikipedia for different reasons.

The report says that ‘net loss’ of volunteers of Wikipedia has escalated over the last one-year period, with that number of new volunteers joining the site being comparatively much lower than those quitting it.

Statistically speaking, Felipe Ortega, a Spanish researcher who analyzed Wikipedia’s editing-history data of almost three million active contributors in 10 languages, noted that in the first quarter of 2009, as many as 49,000 editors of the English-language Wikipedia quit the site, as compared to a net loss of 4,900 editors during the same period last year.

While the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, the chairman emeritus of the foundation, has acknowledged that participation to the site is apparently declining, the foundation’s executive director Sue Gardner specified that the “easy work” of contributing, as in the “gold rush” early days, has now become a thing of the past!