On 28/03/2010, Keegan Paul kgnpaul@gmail.com wrote:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htmIt's obvious of the peak in January of 2007.
What I'm interested in is thoughts of why New Contributors has statistically declined sharply, but the list of active contributors has much less of a slope and even less so for very active contributors.
I think a lot of people get involved to write new articles. It looks like 2007 was 'peak oil' for new articles; after that it was getting harder to find new articles to write; about half of the articles that were realistically likely to be covered, were already covered. (*)
Of course a lot of the articles still weren't *very* good, and many contributors are polishing these articles up, as well as working on the remaining new articles; that's why we're seeing a slower decline on contributors than articles.
What happened in the first six months of 2007? Did we change template systems? Did we reword some policies relating to new users?
There is only a little bit of very weak evidence for something happening and no terribly obvious candidates, the only thing I can think of was that around then there was an increased push for referencing stuff. Before that you could more or less put anything in, it was easy and quick. Nothing really massively changed in terms of policies, they just enforced them more strictly. Referencing is harder and this slowed the growth a bit, but not too badly; I'm pretty sure that the peak isn't down due to just requiring references though, finding new articles to write is getting quite difficult now; this IMO is the driving reason.
This relates to an OTRS project I have going on and I got looking into the userbase question to prep.
~Keegan
* - there's been some new articles required since the Wikipedia started up in 2001; knowledge has been created! New knowledge is eventually going to set the level of continued growth of the Wikipedia, perhaps about 500 articles per day or something. If you look at the new article feed we're growing at about ~1200 articles per day, and perhaps about half of those likely to survive in the feed are now about topics that happened since the Wikipedia started and couldn't have been written in 2001. Basically, the Wikipedia has been playing catch-up on 2001 till now as well as dealing with new knowledge; but IMO it will probably be mostly dealing with new knowledge within the next year or so.