On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.comwrote:
On 17 May 2012 02:21, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500.
Sounds about right.
German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are stable, on the other hand:
It's a bit like mining coal.
If you've only got a few miners, then as you ramp up the miners, the coal output will grow, and then level off and shipped coal will be a flat line, because there's plenty of coal for each miner. That's what's happening in the other Wikipedia's. The haven't got enough contributors to mine all the information out and put it in Wikipedia; the number of new articles will be flat.
If you've got a lot of miners, then the amount of coal shipped will climb up to a peak, as you get the easiest coal out, and then it gets more difficult to mine more and the mining will fall again. That's what's happened on the English Wikipedia, with a much bigger number of English speakers and editors we've been able to create most of the encyclopedic articles we need and polish them up fairly well.
So the fact that the English Wikipedia's growth is falling is a result of wild success, not failure. There's only really a finite number of general ideas out there that humans have come up with, and you can only put them in Wikipedia once.
I think that analysis is optimistic, for several reasons. Editor numbers started falling when en:WP had well under 2 million articles. The number of articles has more than doubled in the five years since then. Editor numbers in the Japanese Wikipedia, meanwhile, are following a similar pattern of decline, even though that project is still well below 1 million articles. This suggests that there can be other reasons than "running out of stuff to write about" for a decline in editor numbers. Lastly, it is not as though there is little work to do in the English Wikipedia. There are backlogs in multiple areas; including over 600 pending submissions at Articles for creation.
Given that en:WP now has 4 million articles, a healthy core editor base is essential to ensure maintenance. A declining core editor base combined with a rising number of articles is not a good development.
Andreas