"Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
while, as I said, I have no particular interest in defending WMDE and have not even read their proposal, let me say that I would find that a preposterous measure of success/failure. You can't just look at a time series of the number of editors and say "good trend -> congrats, chapter" / "bad trend -> oh, guess the chapter did a bad job". What tells you that if a project is experiencing a 10% decline of its editor base from year 1 to year 2 that it wouldn't have lost 20% without the chapter's activities?
Indeed; blaming WMDE for the number of editors in de.wiki is less ridiculous than asking immediate disbanding of WMF for the editor decline. Back to serious numbers: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryDE.htm If you check the graphs for active editors and desktop page views, the two lines are curiously parallel. Coincidence? Yes, several of the biggest Wikipedias are quickly rushing to their death in few years; nobody is doing anything. Cf. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_sudden_decline_of_Italian_Wikip...
Note the different scales on the time axes, though.
But I think the bigger problem will not be the number of ac- tive editors, but the quality of the corpus if the majority of editors indeed "fixes" articles on a train or in a lift.
Tim