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

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The problem we have is well measuring the community and the activities. I am
> looking forward that the UNU-MERIT survey will be a huge step to knowing
> "us" better.
>
> Activity on malinglists and Wikimedia Statistics can only give hints, but
> not tell us about the quality of mails and edits. This is again trying to
> read something from Statistics that cannot be read from them.
>
> A decrease of the total number of edits in a WP language edition can mean,
> for example, a decrease of vandalism. Or: WP rules have been discussed
> largely, now Wikipedians do less discussions. Or: Wikipedians have learned
> to do more within one single edit when writing an article etc. Or: The
> Poplar Bluff syndrome (bot generated geographical stubs / pseudo articles)
> with its aftermath has settled.
>
> A "New Wikipedian" can be simply a vandal, having made 5 edits in a month
> (en.WP will not ban him so fast). Maybe the potential vandals have lost the
> fun, or are all blocked, that's why we have less new Wikipedians etc.
> It is also natural that people create less articles or edit less because
> many articles already exist and are well written.
>
> It may be true that "there is a stagnation or decline", but I cannot see
> substantial evidence for ... well, what is it exactly we mean that shows
> "stagnation" or "decline"?

So, you are saying that:
- Mailing lists have less traffic because we are more mature and we
learned the most important things about each other, which means that
we are talking now less, about more important things.
- New participants of Wikimedia projects are not interested in joining
the lists (note: lists, not just this one) because they are introduced
enough in Wikimedia projects by using other communication channels.
- Decrease of new Wikipedians are product of less vandals.
- Decrease of number of edits (from, let's say, Malay Wikipedia with
31,000+ articles to French with 720,000+ articles) is a product of the
fact that there is not a lot of things to be written anymore.

I would say that:
- We have some problem or set of problems (not necessarily in house)
which made us less attractive.
- Because of that, number of new Wikipedians is decreasing.
- Because of decreased number of new Wikipedians, we have less edits
and less active people on mailing lists.
- Because of less active people on mailing lists, we have smaller
amount of emails on the lists.

While I don't say that your explanation (or something similar) is not
possible, I think that my explanation is more possible.