Those figures are specifically about the English Wikipedia. But the issue is wider than that. Comparing Feb 2008 and Feb 2012 for the whole of Wikipedia in all languages there has been a 10% fall in the number of editors contributing over 100 edits a month. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm As some language communities grew in that era and English declined rather more I think that non-English as a whole was stable. The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has dropped far more steeply. The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most of the names near the top of this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS are blue linked which means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of editor who'd made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year. This was a big issue of concern a year or so back and is one of the major foci of Foundation investment. Hopefully one of the changes, more welcoming templates, a WYSIWYG editor Wikipedia Zero will do the trick and restore community health. The rate of decline has apparently bottomed out, but we do have an ageing volunteer base that is getting top heavy in terms of experience and I suspect age. The greying of the pedia is going to be one of our big challenges in the next few years. I'm pretty sure this isn't a lack of content to add, if anything what we are seeing is that vandalism is harder to find as the edit filters prevent it in the first place, and we are running out of typos to fix. WSC On 2 May 2012 09:50, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all. Thanks for the debate and for sharing your figures and insights. I would like to offer some comments on this (below). ----- Mensaje original ----- These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias. The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities (for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects). However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3 in a group of 20 is a very different story. Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics (lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle periods of more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is usually shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 months). I mention this because, according to one of the comments on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_o… the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim): "editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the light of these results about idle periods. Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits, I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", since absolute figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime had better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a different purpose... In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily or permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got there, and why now we have fewer people following that path. Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is important because very active editors are supposed to have much more experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about the editing process, about how to interact with other community members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more than 3 years (+1,000 days)  in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: also for most of the middle-size Wikipedias). Last, but not least, there is another important connection with maintenance activity. Editors with special accounts (e.g. sysops) may become idle for several days in article editing, but they continue to perform administrative duties systematically. As a result, the trends in the number of new admins and RFAs, and number of administrative changes performed over time should also complement this picture (since many, many admins were not among the most prolific editors when they were appointed). Best, Felipe.

Thanks to you, Yaroslav. It may looks like a little contribution, but I would say it was a very useful coffe-break to nurture comments on this important topic :). Saludos, Felipe.

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:03 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: +1. Maryana Pinchuk and I here at the WMF have recently been looking at English Wikipedia editors who just made their first 1,000 edits to articles, and we've hand coded their topics of contribution: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_milestones It is stunningly obvious to us from observing a couple hundred of these editors that there is: A) still *tons* to write about, and editors know it. No one is asking them to write particular articles, they're just doing it on their own. B) these editors are not (yet) part of the core governance making community for the most part One of the more interesting things is that these editors are mostly contributing to local culture, sports, media, and history about topics not related to America, the UK, Australia, etc. The traditional "core community" that comes from native English-speaking countries has definitely moved on in focus from creating new articles to trying to improve and expand on them. So much so that they recently tried to propose that we don't let new editors create articles until they edit a little bit (e.g. achieving "autoconfirmed" user rights). But from looking at this sample of very active contributors to articles, it is clear that any statement that there is nothing new to write about is simply a problem of perception, because you're asking people from Western countries who don't even see that you're missing good articles about every politician in India, every soccer club in the Bulgaria, every Chinese composer. Just as the first ten years of Wikipedia expanded on the Britannica-style concept of the encyclopedia, the next phase of English content development appears to be coming from people whose understanding of what an encyclopedia is goes way beyond covering dead white guys and textbook concepts. -- Steven Walling https://wikimediafoundation.org/