Those figures are specifically about the English Wikipedia. But the issue is wider than that.
Comparing Feb 2008 and Feb 2012 for the whole of Wikipedia in all languages there has been a 10% fall in the number of editors contributing over 100 edits a month. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm As some language communities grew in that era and English declined rather more I think that non-English as a whole was stable. The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has dropped far more steeply. The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most of the names near the top of this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS are blue linked which means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of editor who'd made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year. This was a big issue of concern a year or so back and is one of the major foci of Foundation investment. Hopefully one of the changes, more welcoming templates, a WYSIWYG editor Wikipedia Zero will do the trick and restore community health. The rate of decline has apparently bottomed out, but we do have an ageing volunteer base that is getting top heavy in terms of experience and I suspect age. The greying of the pedia is going to be one of our big challenges in the next few years. I'm pretty sure this isn't a lack of content to add, if anything what we are seeing is that vandalism is harder to find as the edit filters prevent it in the first place, and we are running out of typos to fix. WSC On 2 May 2012 09:50, Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]> wrote: > Hoi, > I take it this is only about the English Wikipedia... > Thanks, > GerardM > > > On 2 May 2012 10:43, Richard Jensen <[email protected]> wrote: > >> the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now >> than in 2007 >> >> Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month >> Mar 2012 3429 down 34% from Mar 2007 = 5190 >> >> Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month >> Mar 2012 34,372 down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074 >> >> I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to write >> about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not a >> fast-growing teenager any more. ~~~~ >> >> >> >> ______________________________**_________________ >> Wiki-research-l mailing list >> Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.org<[email protected]> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >
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