[Foundation-l] Social networking (was: Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Commons is in a constant and significant decrease since May 2007.
[snip]

Milos, you are in error.

See "Active authors" is holding steady just fine.

Counting new users registrations is flawed because many registrations
are just vandals or the confused public and they never edit. A
decrease in new accounts can just mean that less people are confused.
For some projects, like enwp, the majority of accounts created are of
this type.  I'm also not sure how SUL creations are getting counted, I
suspect they aren't.

The better metrics are usually the most direct ones.  Active
contributor counts haven't seen much change, for example,  Uploads to
commons continue at a nice clip.

Obviously there will be some up and down activity: We should expect
seasonal variation, just as is seen in traffic levels on major
internet backbones. It's important to be mindful that the absence of
explosive growth is not a decline. Nothing can grow explosively
forever.

Of course, we should continue to do things to encourage new
contributors and new contributions. Just as we should find way to
encourage more use and donation. This is always true. But to claim
that there is some impending great failure appears to be unsupported
by the data available thus far.