on 10/9/07 8:30 PM, Milos Rancic at millosh(a)gmail.com wrote: Milos, What do you mean by community education? Marc Riddell

on 10/9/07 9:03 PM, Milos Rancic at millosh(a)gmail.com wrote: Are you referring to specific subject content of articles? Like the USA (with due respect to the other countries represented here) it can soon be called "The United Projects of Wikimedia" :-) Marc

On 10/10/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: Actually, I expect that popular focus slowly switches from Wikipedia to Wikinews. And after a couple of years of Wikinews development we will have the real "United Projects of Wikimedia".

On 10/10/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: Actually, I think that Wikinews with 10% of Wikipedia contributors will become a huge nightmare. Of course, if we wouldn't be prepared for that. I may imagine large scale edit wars on Wikinews, large scale legal problems backed by a large scale of state authorities and multinational companies. Wikinews in the top ten websites would mean that a person who has access to Internet doesn't read/listen/watch any other media. influence in the populations where Internet is a dominant source of informations. This means that some facts presented on Wikinews may lead to the victory/defeat of some political option... Or to much higher/lower market share of some multinational company. And those fields are dangerous and may lead to: 1) closure of Wikinews (and other projects?) or 2) making of Wikinews (and other projects?) a battlefield of different *real* interest groups (implicitly or explicitly) or 3) "pacifying" community and driving it into the stagnation and decline or 4) Wikimedian community as dominant global political force. If not 1, the most possible is merging of the rest three. I don't want to say what is the good option and what is not (maybe all of them are good, maybe all of them are bad). The only fact is that it will be a real nightmare if we wouldn't be prepared. I used the term in very wide range: from the particular subject, via technical knowledge to communication and personal relations. Wikipedia and other Wikimedian should become the school (actually, the whole educational system) of the new age. If we don't take this position, after 20 years Wikipedia will be studied as one of nice, good, but past projects.

I would be very much interested in these numbers for other wikipedias, in particular the german one. Could somebody provide these? A different thing here is that the number of admin edits per day has decreased. I think that is an alarming sign for the english Wikipedia? Bye, Philipp

Or maybe they are spending more time editing policies ... Or perhaps they learned to use preview more often... Or maybe they've taken to editing templates, or doing normal edits via socks or.... It's usually a mistake to draw specific conclusions from general data. On 10/10/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Greg, We look at it differently. The total number of edits made to Wikipedia can never decline, but the rate at which those edits are made can either increase or decrease. I tend to think that it is that rate (rather than the integral) that is the most interesting measure of activity within the Wikipedia community. Hmmmm, I just realized I dropped a word. The title of this thread was supposed to be "the statistical decline of the english Wikipedia COMMUNITY", as it is the descreasing activity of that community that I think is the interesting observation. -Robert On 10/9/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Not to be sarcastic or anything, but that "new speak" would be [[calculus]] :)

On 10/9/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote: The claim was "actually been declining" which isn't supported by the data. It's less than the peak, but you don't call home sales in decline at all times that it is less than its all time peak.

BTW, I see that German Wikipedia is close to the same limits, too. If someone make some statistics of other projects (for example, for projects with more then 1.000 users), I think that we would be able to see the same tendencies. There are only a small number of Wikipedias which are able to make further exponential growth in the sense of user activities: Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Indonesian... "Popular limit" of English Wikipedia is much higher then, for example, a "popular limit" of Serbian Wikipedia. On 10/10/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:

No, I think the exponential growth is based on the perception of "completeness" by editors, the number of red links and whatnot. The decline in growth is definitely not due to the fact that anyone who ever would have wanted to edit, has, because that is simply not true. Mark On 09/10/2007, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

Wikinews Markie wrote: Wikinews is different, it is much more fast-paced than Wikipedia. This may not suit a lot of contributors and whittle down those who do join us to the dedicated. Unfortunately, if Wikinews gains influence it may be the POV warriors who join us and try and influence our content. It is no different. If we have the influence it will encourage people who want to shape that to become involved. However, highly opinionated editors don't work well on Wikinews. As long as there are a core of editors enforcing NPOV Wikinews will work. ?suppresion of free speech?? cant see this being likely. Wikinews *should* become a place for more Wikimedians to settle down. As a site dedicated to current affairs there is always the opportunity to create a new article. Some may find that we're a little rushed in some issues, but there is always a buzz about the place. What I want to see is the Wikipedia folks who do the "In the news" section starting to cover their stories in more depth on Wikinews and linking to Wikinews from Wikipedia. The ideal is that the news is covered on Wikinews and used as a source for Wikipedia articles. This is how I hope to see the relationship between the two projects develop. Brian.