This issue of sufficient participation does appear of rising concern to wikipedia's survival following our first community peak in ~2007 and has brought my attention back to the project after some years of inactivity.  In my opinion, revisions to the interface will be central to eliciting more non-meta edits from casual users who need not be fully educated on the code syntax or policy behind the curtain.

Is there an active conversation I've yet to find that is focusing on this issue of editor population over time?

The Percentage of Maximum statistic shown here http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm for "active" editors with over 5 and 100 edits this month are ~80% and ~90% respectively down from their peaks in 2007.  These stats appear to be trending downward, but not steeply.

The article count growth rate stabilized and continues to decline.  I don't yet find recent numbers on vandalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GROWTH

I would also like to see numbers extending this work on strategy from from 2010 to the present : 
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results#Editor_retention_has_not_worsened_over_the_past_three_years_.28Finding_.234.29 

-michael waggoner
[[en:user:here]]


On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 7:28 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon@post.pl> wrote:

On 10/31/2012 6:34 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Piotr Konieczny, 31/10/2012 23:08:
Would anyone have/know where to find any of the following estimates for

* of Wikipedians with a userpage

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#namespaces gives you the number of pages in User: namespace.

Thanks, I thought i new this page, but I guess I didn't new it well enough.

Incidentally, here's a chilling number: the average number of new editors per month in 2011 was 7,700, in 2012 it is forming up to be about 6,500. I don't like this trend at all; I thought the number of new editors was supposed to have stabilized at some point, what I am seeing there suggest a steady decline that continues up to this day. I didn't bother modelling it yet, but if this keeps up, in few years Wikipedia will be a virtual desert.


--
Piotr Konieczny

"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski



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