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

[Ian Woollard]

On 10/10/2007, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/10/07, Steven Walling <steven.walling at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dismissal of your conclusions and evidence is not the same as rudeness.
> A
> > little faith? Are you kidding me? Broad claims such as the ones you make
> are
> > not something I take on faith, and in case you've forgotten, AGF doesn't
> > apply to statistical data. You're the only person that I've seen to date
> > suggest that involvement in en-wiki is waning.
> >
>
> A number of Wikipedians have pointed out the changes (starting around
> a year ago) that en-wiki has gone through:
>
> Among others, see:
>
> http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/09/10/two-million-english-wikipedia-articles-celebrate/
> http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/06/28/wikipedia-plateau/
>
> http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/03/watershed-in-history-of-wikipedia.html
>
> http://original-research.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-wikipedia-approaching-barrier.html
>
> I actually found Robert's conclusions much less surprising than he did
> (perhaps because he is just back from an extended break, while I and
> others have been watching this happen for a while).


Presumably an encyclopedia is finite, there's a finite number of things that
a person would expect to find in an encyclopedia, and each article can only
be so big, before it gets broken up and/or merged.

In software, and in a sense the wikipedia is software, we find that the
number of bugs in a piece of software exponentially declines over time, as
people find and fix them. Arguably people writing the wikipedia are finding
and fixing bugs in it- things that are missing or wrong. That would argue
that the graph of size against person-hours would exponentially approach the
omega point. However, meanwhile the number of contributors/viewers is
exponentially growing (assuming that a certain percentage of viewers are
contributors).

That argues that the Wikipedia is tending to an 'omega point' where it is
'perfect', where you've recorded everything that should be in an
encyclopedia!

So when you take account of both effects, growth of new users/editors and
exponential decay of bugs, so far as the amount of work done goes, you get a
curve that looks a bit like a normal distribution curve- the same shape as
the peak-oil curve and for similar reasons. It's possible that the downturn
is that curve starting to come down. If it is starting to come down, perhaps
it means, like the peak-oil curve means that the oil is half used up, that
the English wikipedia is half written (obviously except for new discoveries
and news)!

-Sage
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.