[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

[Steven Walling]

You're trying to make an accurate judgment based on 100k of articles from a
2 million article field? Don't insult our intelligence.

On 10/9/07, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been taking an extended wiki-break during the last 6 weeks, but
> during
> that time I've also reflected on the state of Wikipedia.  Rather than
> simply
> relying on my own observations, I started asking questions and went
> looking
> for statistical answers.
>
> As many of you are probably aware, the statistics package hosted at
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm has not been updated
> in
> about a year due to the failure of all recent attempts to create a
> complete
> database dump for enwiki.
>
> Given the lack of any recent official stats, I set out to generate my own
> using a dump of the Wikipedia log files and by systematically downloading
> (over many days) the history page contents for 100,000 articles.
>
> My analysis from doing this gave me a big surprise.  Since early this
> year,
> and for the first extended period in Wikipedia's history, the activity
> rate of the Wikipedia community has been declining.  This can be seen in
> the
> rate of editing articles (-17%), the rate of new account registration
> (-25%), blocks (-30%), protections (-30%), uploads (-10%), article
> deletions
> (-25%), etc.  Some exceptions are the article creation rate (+25%) and
> image
> deletions (+80%), but overall the community appears to be doing less now
> than it was 6 months ago.
>
> Given Wikipedia's long history of nearly exponential growth, any decline
> in
> our editing rate is surprising, but I also find the sharpness of the
> turn-around to be remarkable.  Though it may merely be coincidence, the
> timing of the change is near the breaking of the Essjay story in the news.
>
> At the same time the frequency of reverts (as a fraction of all article
> edits) continues to increase, while administrators now devote more than
> 1/3
> of their article space edits to making reverts.
>
> For charts and additional information see:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis
>
>
> I'm not going to launch into an extended discussion of what's wrong with
> Wikipedia, but I do think we need to be paying attention to these trends
> and
> taking steps to intervene where possible.
>
> -Robert Rohde
> aka Dragons_flight
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