The year in review
It is a difficult task to stand back and summarise what happened during a whole year for such a sprawling, complicated phenomenon as the Wikimedia movement. This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars".
But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project and "its stated ambition to 'compile the sum of all human knowledge' are in trouble" from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community (sure enough, the statistics for edits and editor numbers over the past year are looking queasy for most projects, although page views are holding up).
The Signpost explores one take on what 2013 was for the movement.