[Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia

[Ronald Beelaard]

> Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:06:40 +0100
> From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Lack of research on Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
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> 2009/8/16 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> > For me while interesting, it is hardly new and therefore not that
> > interesting what people like Ed H Chi write about
> Wikipedia. They do not
> > write about Wikipedia, they write about the English
> language Wikipedia.
> > Invariably news written about Wikipedia concentrates on
> just one of over 260
> > projects. It diminishes what Wikipedia is about and it
> ignores important
> > things that are happening.
>
>
> Yes, completely. Do other Wikipedias show the same S-curve of growth?
> Large ones, small ones? *That* is interesting. Let's see if we can
> encourage PARC along these lines. Or indeed competing researchers.
>
>
> - d.

I've been plotting growth for en:, de:, fr: and nl: for many years (to use
in presentations) and observed the same flattening effect happening in all.
To understand a bit better the cause, the following graph
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nl-EditsPerDay.jpg, showing the edit
activity over time, might be more interesting. The peak of edit activity for
all four WPs lies somewhere around 2007. Since then it is going down.
Communities of non en:wp obviously are smaller than en:. But in absolute
terms still a fraction of # of people speaking the language. Visiting
popularity of WP has grown tremendously during the past couple of years.
That all together supports PARC's tentative conclusions.

Rgds Ronald