[WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Ian Woollard]

On 17 May 2012 02:21, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in
> early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500.
>

Sounds about right.


> German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are
> stable, on the other hand:
>

It's a bit like mining coal.

If you've only got a few miners, then as you ramp up the miners, the coal
output will grow, and then level off and shipped coal will be a flat line,
because there's plenty of coal for each miner. That's what's happening in
the other Wikipedia's. The haven't got enough contributors to mine all the
information out and put it in Wikipedia; the number of new articles will be
flat.

If you've got a lot of miners, then the amount of coal shipped will climb
up to a peak, as you get the easiest coal out, and then it gets more
difficult to mine more and the mining will fall again. That's what's
happened on the English Wikipedia, with a much bigger number of English
speakers and editors we've been able to create most of the encyclopedic
articles we need and polish them up fairly well.

So the fact that the English Wikipedia's growth is falling is a result of
wild success, not failure. There's only really a finite number of general
ideas out there that humans have come up with, and you can only put them in
Wikipedia once.

Andreas
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard