[Foundation-l] Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

> Brianna Laugher wrote:
>> Does anyone feel that the community in general is more vibrant and
>> spirited than it was two years ago? Does anyone feel that there are
>> more new people coming through the ranks? And this activity dropoff is
>> actually an anomaly rather than a reflection of reality?
>>
>> I don't.
>>
>> Is wiki editing not the cool internet habit that it used to be? Is
>> Wikipedia too popular, too fossilised now? Why aren't we enrapturing
>> the college students that we were just a few years ago?
>
> Well, perhaps not a cool internet habit, but I think only to the extent
> that it's no longer some underground thing that people are still trying
> to work out the usefulness of. I think if anything it's due to Wikipedia
> being hugely successful, having gotten over its growing pains to be more
> or less a thing that people accept. Some reasonable parameters for how
> to go about the projects have already been worked out to a great enough
> extent that they're useful and can be accepted as givens (e.g.
> verifiability, an increase in referencing, etc.), and so a large number
> of Wikipedia editors these days just edit Wikipedia, but don't
> participate in meta-discussions *about* Wikipedia. That is, we're done
> with the early phase of discussing how to go about building an
> encyclopedia, and are now mostly focusing on actually building an
> encyclopedia. =]
>

Sometimes I ask myself whether I am the only one on this list who still
edits articles on a regular basis. I thought everyone who actually writes
content there sees some very much clearly posed problems, like almost full
absence of full-size specialized articles (mostly in science, but also in
humanities). It is interesting of course that people go blogging instead
of writing the actual content, but I am afraid even if we completely solve
this point by integrating blogs / irc / whatever with Wikimedia, it is not
going to improve the above problems.

Cheers
Yaroslav