Yet since Dec 2008 the total number of articles on the English Wikipedia
has risen by 50% - 2.6m to 3.9m
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm (and quite a few of
those that existed in 2008 have since gone). Word count per article was
also increasing from Dec 2008 to Jan 2010 (we don't seem to have word
counts for the last couple of years).
I rather suspect that editing on Olympics related stuff is on a four year
cycle, and that former Olympians may not be updated much till they die. -
We pick up large numbers of sportspeople in the Death anomaly project.
Otherwise the picture is more complex.
Intrawiki links will account for some of the increase in average word
count, it would be interesting to know whether articles in general tend to
get longer and the proportion of new stubs that get expanded per year.
The somewhat arbitrary criteria that actually apply at new page patrol have
in my experience been getting tougher, so the de facto minimum word count
needed for a new article to survive is probably rather higher now than it
was in 2006. This might help explain the increase in average word count per
article.
There is in my view a tendency among some wikipedians to prefer to start
new articles as opposed to improve existing ones, and new articles on major
topics are relatively rare.
There has been a major drive to up the minimum standards for certain types
of articles. This has involved a large group of editors and possibly
distracted them away from articles on major topics to improve less
important ones ( the unreferenced BLP project involved nearly 2% of all
articles).
In a similar vein the attempts by a group of more deletionist editors to
get borderline and sometimes not so borderline articles deleted has got rid
of many relatively short articles, and distracted many other editors from
the articles that most need work to the ones that are most in danger of
deletion.
Specifically with your examples of major wars and major generals, the focus
of the Milhist project in recent years on "majestic titans" the project to
get a Featured Article on every Battleship is bound to have diverted some
editors away from wars and generals. It has certainly influenced my editing
and I'm not a member of the project or even particularly interested in the
subject.
The cumulative effect of all this may well mean that once an article gets
to a certain standard it can be quite stable for some years. Which might be
rather reassuring to our writers. But it would be worth testing a more
random group. There is also a good chance that wikiprojects effect the
articles in their purview, MilHist has long been our biggest and best
organised WikiProject, but generally WikiProjects have their own cycles of
enthusiasm and moribundity.
I suspect we also have a difference between areas where our editors are
subject matter experts and areas where they are not. Medicine is supposedly
a WikiProject with an unusually high proportion of editors who are subject
matter experts in real life. I couldn't single out a Wikiproject where the
editors had a low level of expertise, but I'm pretty sure that MilHist has
more than its fair share of teenage boys among the active editors. It would
be interesting to test to see if Medicine related articles were generally
more up-to-date than the average.
WereSpielChequers
On 2 May 2012 01:30, Laura Hale <laura(a)fanhistory.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Richard Jensen <rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:
I am looking at the edit history of a number of
major articles on
historical topics (in the English Wikipedia)
Sports has this as a bit of a huge problem. I've found a number of
articles where they have not been updated since 2008 for Olympians and the
upcoming Olympic Games where some of these athletes will compete in again
have not been updated to reflect that yet.
--
twitter: purplepopple
blog:
ozziesport.com
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