On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.wooll...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On 17 May 2012 02:21, Andreas Kolbe <jayen...@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
