[Foundation-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia

[Brian]

Those are great stats, thanks for your work! I'm not surprised to see a
decline, personally. The internet is not infinitely big. Having absorbed
traffic from all previous contenders, we are running up against an
insurmountable wall; namely, yahoo, google, microsoft, myspace and facebook.
Considering we generate a significant portion of traffic from search
engines, it seems unlikely that we will pass the top five or so for the
foreseeable future. That very traffic that we absorbed is no less than the
unwashed masses, not all of which are content to satisfy their information
need and move on. They feel the need to also take the "edit this page" offer
as advertised, 20% of the time leaving the encyclopedia dirtier than when
they found it. We can only hope that the thrill of being able to do that
wears off by the time the next generation comes through.

On 10/9/07, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I sent my primary message to wikien-l but I think the issue is important
> enough to warrant general awareness from the Foundation.
>
> I have recently compiled a new statistical analysis of the English
> Wikipedia
> independent of the "official" stats that have been offline for the last
> year.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis
>
> The surprising conclusion is that the rate of article editting on the
> English Wikipedia has actually been declining during the last 6 months.
>
> -Robert Rohde
> aka Dragons_flight
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