Thanks for all very interesting comments, I take it as support, that my hunch can be correct, that we are losing readers as a consequence of new ways to find information on the internet has emerged ("snippets", new tools and google code that gives better data then Wikipedia, and that links to Wikipedia gets lower priority in search engines).
In my home turf (svwp, 13,5% fewer reads, just as other mature wps) I have two examples:
*Our (OK) covidrelated articles have not been among the ten most visited pages during the pandemic, but our (good) article on Spanish flu was in the first months among top tree. And at searches the svwp articles on Covid was way down in the search result. I believe this was correct as other provider (including enwp) had better info to give, and Google had even their own created data.
*articles on my own speciality, 7500 articles on old administrative units in Sweden, have not shown a decrease in reading, but are fairly constant or marginally up. For these there are few other data providers on internet, and and more and more genealogist and local people learn that these articles exist
I am not worried a fewer hits, as our readers have found better info elsewhere, and see this fully in line of our aim to provide knowledge to all, and that is fulfilled even if this is done by better other means the Wikipedia interface.
But as other has indicated, is this also related to fewer contributors (as facts indicate, down 10-20%, even when a possible boom in 2020 is discarded)? On svwp we have a lot of contributors that gets active on "news breaks", and perhaps these articles gets less rewarding when these wp articles gets low priority in search engines, as there are better infoproviders and/or ways to provide readers with info from WP/WD?
I believe we are and will be best in providing typical encyclopedisc text, like of the Spanish flu. And perhaps we will not be best in other areas, like providing info in multimedia form
Anders
Den 2022-01-07 kl. 18:41, skrev Anders Wennersten:
When I look at statistics for mature wikipedias: en, de pl, nl they all show a decrease of views of 13-15% in last 12 months from a year ago, and number of active editors down 10- 20 % (with exception of en).
Has this been analysed somewhere, are we losing our readers and contributors or is it mostly Google that access our info "smarter" not creating "views"
Anders
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/de.wikipedia.org
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/nl.wikipedia.org
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