[WikiEN-l] Difficulty making structural changes to WP due to human nature?

[Steven Walling]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Doesn't this approach assume that people all interact with Wikipedia
> in the same way? Many people only participate in a vanishingly small
> part of Wikipedia and you can have some areas that are deserted and
> others that are very active. This isn't found by looking at global
> statistics, but by looking at the actual editing and histories out
> there "on the ground".
>
> Carcharoth
>

Yes, looking at edits overall, pages created overall, or bytes added overall
are all very generalized tools. For instance, we'd need deeper quant work or
qualitative coding in order to see what is being done in that steady
proportion of NS4 activity in English.

But the general trends are pretty clear, and help to point us in the right
direction when working qualitatively or trying to prove/disprove general
hypotheses such as "Is the the project namespace still growing, in decline,
or stable?"

Steven