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

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/7/20 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>:
>> 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).
>
> Perhaps rather than counting new articles, we should be looking at
> the amount of text added to articles? As I understand it, there's a
> bit of a shift going on from creating new articles to improving
> existing ones, and that seems like a reasonable metric to measure
> that from (especially if only article text, rather than templates,
> was counted). Of course, it's also a lot harder to calculate...

"edits per article" is the best statistic we have for that at the
moment (and it's fairly steady). Once we have a full dump we'll be
able to get better statistics. I don't know what the timeframe for
that is, but I understand it is being worked on.