Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:06:40 +0100 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140908160506t55a8411vb5e8b25772acfedb@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

2009/8/16 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:

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For me while interesting, it is hardly new and therefore not that interesting what people like Ed H Chi write about

Wikipedia. They do not

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write about Wikipedia, they write about the English

language Wikipedia.

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Invariably news written about Wikipedia concentrates on

just one of over 260

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projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about and it

ignores important

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things that are happening.

Yes, completely. Do other Wikipedias show the same S-curve of growth? Large ones, small ones? *That* is interesting. Let's see if we can encourage PARC along these lines. Or indeed competing researchers.

• d.

I've been plotting growth for en:, de:, fr: and nl: for many years (to use in presentations) and observed the same flattening effect happening in all. To understand a bit better the cause, the following graph http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nl-EditsPerDay.jpg, showing the edit activity over time, might be more interesting. The peak of edit activity for all four WPs lies somewhere around 2007. Since then it is going down. Communities of non en:wp obviously are smaller than en:. But in absolute terms still a fraction of # of people speaking the language. Visiting popularity of WP has grown tremendously during the past couple of years. That all together supports PARC's tentative conclusions.

Rgds Ronald