Brianna Laugher wrote:
Does anyone feel that the community in general is more vibrant and spirited than it was two years ago? Does anyone feel that there are more new people coming through the ranks? And this activity dropoff is actually an anomaly rather than a reflection of reality?
I don't.
Is wiki editing not the cool internet habit that it used to be? Is Wikipedia too popular, too fossilised now? Why aren't we enrapturing the college students that we were just a few years ago?
Well, perhaps not a cool internet habit, but I think only to the extent that it's no longer some underground thing that people are still trying to work out the usefulness of. I think if anything it's due to Wikipedia being hugely successful, having gotten over its growing pains to be more or less a thing that people accept. Some reasonable parameters for how to go about the projects have already been worked out to a great enough extent that they're useful and can be accepted as givens (e.g. verifiability, an increase in referencing, etc.), and so a large number of Wikipedia editors these days just edit Wikipedia, but don't participate in meta-discussions *about* Wikipedia. That is, we're done with the early phase of discussing how to go about building an encyclopedia, and are now mostly focusing on actually building an encyclopedia. =]
Sometimes I ask myself whether I am the only one on this list who still edits articles on a regular basis. I thought everyone who actually writes content there sees some very much clearly posed problems, like almost full absence of full-size specialized articles (mostly in science, but also in humanities). It is interesting of course that people go blogging instead of writing the actual content, but I am afraid even if we completely solve this point by integrating blogs / irc / whatever with Wikimedia, it is not going to improve the above problems.
Cheers Yaroslav