[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[Ian Woollard]

On 28/03/2010, Keegan Paul <kgnpaul at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
>
> <http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm>It's obvious of the
> peak in January of 2007.
>
> What I'm interested in is thoughts of why New Contributors has statistically
> declined sharply, but the list of active contributors has much less of a
> slope and even less so for very active contributors.

I think a lot of people get involved to write new articles. It looks
like 2007 was 'peak oil' for new articles; after that it was getting
harder to find new articles to write; about half of the articles that
were realistically likely to be covered, were already covered. (*)

Of course a lot of the articles still weren't *very* good, and many
contributors are polishing these articles up, as well as working on
the remaining new articles; that's why we're seeing a slower decline
on contributors than articles.

> What happened in the first six months of 2007?  Did we change template
> systems?  Did we reword some policies relating to new users?

There is only a little bit of very weak evidence for something
happening and no terribly obvious candidates, the only thing I can
think of was that around then there was an increased push for
referencing stuff. Before that you could more or less put anything in,
it was easy and quick. Nothing really massively changed in terms of
policies, they just enforced them more strictly. Referencing is harder
and this slowed the growth a bit, but not too badly; I'm pretty sure
that the peak isn't down due to just requiring references though,
finding new articles to write is getting quite difficult now; this IMO
is the driving reason.

> This relates to an OTRS project I have going on and I got looking into the
> userbase question to prep.
>
> ~Keegan

* - there's been some new articles required since the Wikipedia
started up in 2001; knowledge has been created! New knowledge is
eventually going to set the level of continued growth of the
Wikipedia, perhaps about 500 articles per day or something. If you
look at the new article feed we're growing at about ~1200 articles per
day, and perhaps about half of those likely to survive in the feed are
now about topics that happened since the Wikipedia started and
couldn't have been written in 2001. Basically, the Wikipedia has been
playing catch-up on 2001 till now as well as dealing with new
knowledge; but IMO it will probably be mostly dealing with new
knowledge within the next year or so.
-- 
-Ian Woollard