Certain projects are bound to loose active contributors. Projects like Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikispecies or even Wiktionary do not have the same growth curve as a general purpose encyclopedia. These tools have serious competition as well. Statistically looking at numbers is unwise unless you are going to look at it with a perspective. This is not to say these projects are without problem, but that doesn't mean the wikis are failures.
-- とある白い猫 (To Aru Shiroi Neko)
2011/9/13 David Richfield davidrichfield@gmail.com
In the discussion of the Wikinews fork (may they thrive), I picked up some comments predicting the death of Wiktionary and Wikiquote, referring to the low numbers of regular contributors.
I don't think that means the projects are dying: I'm an infrequent contributor to both of those projects, and every time I go there, they're better. Wikiquote is continually improving in coverage and accuracy, and Wiktionary has recently gotten new features (e.g. a separate citations tab) and is also going forward. People are checking recent changes: last time I edited Wiktionary, I was adding citations to an article where the current list was in reverse chronological order, and I was too lazy to change it, thinking "someone else can fix this". Before I got to the third citation, someone had fixed the sequence.
The fact that progress is slowing isn't a sign of impending death. As long as the wikis don't stagnate to the extent that they start to get taken over by spammers and trolls, I'm not going to hold a wake.
As for Wikiquote being one of our less useful projects, that's possibly true, but only because the other projects are so awesome! The web is awash with crap quotation websites of with the same misattributed quotes being incestuously copied around - Wikiquote is one beacon of sanity in that whole mess.
-- David Richfield e^(πi)+1=0
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