Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:06:40 +0100
From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
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2009/8/16 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:
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
write about Wikipedia, they write about the
English
language Wikipedia.
Invariably news written about Wikipedia
concentrates on
just one of over 260
projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about
and it
ignores important
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
, 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