I got bored and so threw together a simple list of numbers that shows the old news of the english wikipedia's decline. Many wikipedians are under the impression that wikipedia's growth has simply plateaued and that it will increase at a fairly linear rate. This applies to the german and french editions which have leveled off in terms in of growth rate, but for the english wikipedia its fairly clear that things are heading downhill across the board in terms of growth. This follows the standard growth and decline of many online communities which become saturated and old.

The very non-techincal idiots page is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Seddon/State_of_the_wiki. It covers the key things.

Feel free to trash what I've said or to ignore it if its that old that noone cares anymore I suppose the more important point to look at is are there any ways to counteract this or is it something that will simply run its course?

Seddon

The main problem for wikipedia and it's (unachievable) goal of quality is there are simply not going to be enough regular editors to maintain even the low standards it currently has. Even with slower growth, the numbers look pretty horrific from a quality control perceptive.

I think the decline in both number of editors and number of edits can be explained by the improvements in detecting and blocking sockpuppets. Fewer sockpuppets means fewer editors. Less vandalism means fewer edits and fewer reverts. GRAWP is dead.

You're looking at this all wrong - it's good news for WP! Isn't the goal to have no edits because everything is perfect? We need more - and bigger - range blocks to improve the stats even more.

I agree that the goal should be zero edits, but I expect that at that point the content will be degenerate rather than perfect.

Is there any acceleration detectable in the downward trend?

Having looked at the 12, 9 and 6 month moving averages it seems to be a fairly linear trend, however I imagine that the downward trend will decelerate. Another year should provide sufficient data to see how long this decline will last and whether it will plataeu or simply taper off. The latter I think is less likely.

That's a good, easy to follow analysis.

Question is, why would people here want to look for ways to counteract this decline?

Does that also note suggest the opposite ... that the inflated claims to greatness on the basis of how many edits and editors there were, were indeed inflated on the basis of pointless and needless editing.

The Pee-dia suffers from two diseases; one common in the IT world and the other in religious cults.

Those are:

• IT ... Bigur numbaz iz bettur.

Bigger number are without question "better" ... our computer components have even bigger numbers than last year when, in reality, what was really need was to reduce the crap and bloat in the software and user skills so that you did not need "bigger numbers" in order to carry out simple operations.

I emphasize the "idiot value" of stuff the consumers do not even understand and how it is pushed by the marketeers, e.g. if I buy 64 bit I must be getting twice as much as 32 bit

• Cults ... Hyperbolic and equally meaningless claims of value based on exaggeration of one's own importance.

For example, saving the world by giving it "all of the world's knowledge" (... including, seemingly, lots of animations of cum shots and pictures of pierced labia). Saving the entire World or owning all "The Supreme Knowledge". See also anima/animus projection.

It is not enough just to learn how to spell correctly, write grammatically, organize a group, be ordinary or even - god forbid - be competent in one area ... everything has to be a 'Global' mission of some supreme and all encompassing value that blind one from the obvious realities. The reality being that product is sub-mediocre to corrosive and not just energetically inefficient (that is to say consumes much more benefit that it produces), but parasitical.

This last element is a rather obvious but I feel an overlooked one ... Social entropy.

Closed social structures tend toward extremes and decline. Many, or perhaps most, movements/NPOs/religions etc suffer the same problem when the amount of money and labor it requires FROM society to sustain it, overwhelms the benefit given back TO society.