Wikipedia, free online encyclopedia, is losing authors, said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales speaking with the Associated Press.

The average age of a Wikipedia contributor is 26. People grow up, find interesting job get married and leave, he said adding there are fewer new entries to add after 10-year work of the website.

The company plans to launch a new program which will attract professors and students particularly from in India, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Britain.

Armenian representatives of the encyclopedia are also engaged in increasing the number of articles in the Armenian language and involvement of new young authors.

One of the admins of the Armenian version of Wikipedia Aleksey Chalabyan told Armenian News-NEWS.am - Innovations they are negotiating with Education and Science Ministry to raise the issue in schools and colleges of Armenia.

Thus, they will try to involve new contributors, he said stressing that work in the encyclopedia must remain voluntary.

Chalabyan noted that the number of authors in Armenia neither increases nor reduces.

 “At the moment there are ten active contributors,” he said noting it is difficult to specify the correct number of authors.

He stressed that the Armenian version has been recently updated with sport articles referring to soccer and chess written mainly by young authors. On average contributors write for Wikipedia for 2-3 years and then leave the website.

Wikipedia was created in 2001 as nonprofit project. At the moment encyclopedia has about 9,25 million articles in 250 languages. The Armenian-language articles have been created for six years totaling over 14,000.

According to Google, Wikipedia.org is the fifth most visited website in the world after Facebook.com, YouTube.com, Yahoo.com and Live.com