[WikiEN-l] At last, a new stats run for en:wp!

[Sage Ross]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 7:20 AM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

>
> Cool! I'm too lazy to look. Anything there worth discussing?
>

To me, the data is really encouraging.  Take a look at the charts for
New Wikipedians vs. Active Wikipedians.  We knew before that both of
those peaked in early 2007.  But now it seems that the decline has
more or less stabilized, and the decline in active Wikipedians was
less severe than new Wikipedians.  Edits per month, and maybe new
articles per month, look to be stabilizing as well.

Broadly speaking, there are two possible explanations for why
community activity level peaked and then declined: market saturation
(just about everyone likely to edit was exposed to Wikipedia by mid
2007) or project maturity (activity declines because people can't find
things to do).  Obviously there are elements of both at work, but
comparing the new and active charts suggests to me that market
saturation has been the dominant factor, and that editors are not
having too much trouble finding things to work on.  That's much more
cause for optimism than if people were leaving simply because they
were satisfied with a 'good enough' Wikipedia (which everyone here
knows has a long way to go yet).

In another thread, Will Johnson (I think) argued that activity levels
(new articles, in particular) would continue to decline rapidly in the
next few years and that by Christmas we would have fewer than 1000 new
articles per day.  Looking at the new stats, I'm more confident that
en-wiki can maintain a steady state of activity something close to the
present level (especially as the usability efforts begin to make it
easier for newbies to edit, after years of increasingly complex markup
that did the opposite).

-Sage