On 4 September 2012 21:01, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-e… The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use! I've quickly graphed the recent numbers (just focusing on the period after the initial exponential growth, so starting in 2007): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_… It seems that the rate of decline may be slowing, at least. Which I guess is something. The really interesting part comes from separating out the data for the English Wikipedia, which is 30% down from its 2007 peak, down from 50,000 editors to 35,000 - the graph is smoother, but otherwise looks very similar to the first one. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_… In fact, the decline on en.wp is so steep that it actually represents almost all the overall decline in the projects; if you look at the totals for every project except en.wp, the graph jumps around a bit but is actually quite stable. Since the start of 2008, the three-month moving average has always been 40,000 editors +- 5%. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_… One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk