On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 3:02 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On 17 May 2012 02:21, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)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