[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[Aaron Adrignola]

>
> From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
>
> I was surprised to see the pagecount figures on en.wikibooks! Is this
> no new pages being created, or is it page creation being approximately
> equal to the rate of deleting old pages?
>
>
The full period graph has an anomaly where pages went from almost 39,000 to
just under 35,000 and that was the result of merging the histories of pages
that were part of the same textbook but were later "editions" created by
class projects over several semesters derived by copying and pasting content
in one page to a new one and then making improvements.  Quite often I see
editing patterns indicative of schools and universities editing Wikibooks;
work by several contributors all showing up at once on a new or existing
book is a clear indication as the normal trend is a lone editor working on a
book at any period in time.

The one-year graph will be more accurate [1].  The major dips were largely
books transwikied to Wikiversity due to original research concerns.  The
number of new pages has been such a trickle that the overall trend is
largely flat.

That said, it is possible that this graph is not entirely accurate either.
Content pages for the purposes of the software include a link to another
page in the wiki, and that doesn't count links in the navigational templates
that books often use.  Many pages do not have links to other pages other
than in those templates, so there is an outstanding feature request to count
any page with a comma instead [2].

- Adrignola

[1] http://www.wikistatistics.net/wikibooks/en/articles/365
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27256