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

Wed Oct 10 03:43:59 UTC 2007

I think there is a new field for greatly increased activity in
Wikipedia -- for the sort of content that is not popular culture or
routine geography. One of them is the expansion of editing into
material not covered by the internet--into the world before 1990. As a
librarian, I hope some will come from increased use and access to
libraries. More likely, it will come from Google Book Search, which
will permit even  those limiting themselves to the internet to work
effectively with everything through about 1920.

On 10/9/07, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> BTW, I see that German Wikipedia is close to the same limits, too. If
> someone make some statistics of other projects (for example, for
> projects with more then 1.000 users), I think that we would be able to
> see the same tendencies. There are only a small number of Wikipedias
> which are able to make further exponential growth in the sense of user
> activities: Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Indonesian... "Popular limit" of
> English Wikipedia is much higher then, for example, a "popular limit"
> of Serbian Wikipedia.
>
> On 10/10/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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".
> >
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.