"Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> while, as I said, I have no particular interest in
defending WMDE and have
> not even read their proposal, let me say that I would find that a
> preposterous measure of success/failure. You can't just look at a time
> series of the number of editors and say "good trend -> congrats,
chapter" /
> "bad trend -> oh, guess the chapter did a bad job". What tells you that
if
> a project is experiencing a 10% decline of its editor base from year 1 to
> year 2 that it wouldn't have lost 20% without the chapter's activities?
Indeed; blaming WMDE for the number of editors in
de.wiki is
less ridiculous than asking immediate disbanding of WMF for
the editor decline.
Back to serious numbers:
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryDE.htm
If you check the graphs for active editors and desktop page
views, the two lines are curiously parallel. Coincidence?
Yes, several of the biggest Wikipedias are quickly rushing
to their death in few years; nobody is doing anything.
Cf.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_sudden_decline_of_Italian_Wiki…
Note the different scales on the time axes, though.
But I think the bigger problem will not be the number of ac-
tive editors, but the quality of the corpus if the majority
of editors indeed "fixes" articles on a train or in a lift.
Tim