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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>


I think that analysis is optimistic, for several reasons. Editor numbers
started falling when en:WP had well under 2 million articles. The number of
articles has more than doubled in the five years since then. Editor numbers
in the Japanese Wikipedia, meanwhile, are following a similar pattern of
decline, even though that project is still well below 1 million articles.
This suggests that there can be other reasons than "running out of stuff to
write about" for a decline in editor numbers. Lastly, it is not as though
there is little work to do in the English Wikipedia. There are backlogs in
multiple areas; including over 600 pending submissions at Articles for
creation.

Given that en:WP now has 4 million articles, a healthy core editor base is
essential to ensure maintenance. A declining core editor base combined with
a rising number of articles is not a good development.

Andreas