On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Commons is in a constant and significant decrease since May 2007.
[snip]
Milos, you are in error.
See "Active authors" is holding steady just fine.
Counting new users registrations is flawed because many registrations are just vandals or the confused public and they never edit. A decrease in new accounts can just mean that less people are confused. For some projects, like enwp, the majority of accounts created are of this type. I'm also not sure how SUL creations are getting counted, I suspect they aren't.
The better metrics are usually the most direct ones. Active contributor counts haven't seen much change, for example, Uploads to commons continue at a nice clip.
Obviously there will be some up and down activity: We should expect seasonal variation, just as is seen in traffic levels on major internet backbones. It's important to be mindful that the absence of explosive growth is not a decline. Nothing can grow explosively forever.
Of course, we should continue to do things to encourage new contributors and new contributions. Just as we should find way to encourage more use and donation. This is always true. But to claim that there is some impending great failure appears to be unsupported by the data available thus far.