[Foundation-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia

Wed Oct 10 01:41:22 UTC 2007

On 10/9/07, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> Those are great stats, thanks for your work! I'm not surprised to see a
> decline, personally.
[snip]

Hey! In what kind of new-speak is a *daily* *increase* of 140,000
somethings or 2,000 somethings, or 7,000 something a *decline*?

The headline should instead be "The rate of something is lower than
its all time peak!" or "First derivative of a non-exponential function
turns out to be flat!" ... :)

It's the truth that the character of EnWp's growth has changed in the
last year. I think Milos' comments up-thread were pretty intresting.
... but I think it's really misleading to look at these numbers and
say "decline".