Bangalore: With around 325 million monthly visitors, wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular website in the world. But the site is going through a bad phase as large number of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

In his interview to 'The Wall Street Journal,' Andrew Lih, Author of Wikipedia Revolution said that volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year.

In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, ten times compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish Researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit venture, acknowledge the declines, but believe they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia still remains enormously popular among users, with the number of web visitors growing 20 percent in the 12 months ending in September. However, the question is that how the weakening of the volunteers affect the reliability of the content.

Recently a study by computer scientist Ed Chi and colleagues had warned that changes in the Wikipedia website could compromise the encyclopaedia's quality in the long term. The number of articles added to the site with over three million articles, had come down considerably since 2006.

Of course, the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. After all the lifeline of a website is its accuracy. Lack of a strong team of editorial volunteers may adversely affect the reliability of Wikipedia.