It's slowly dying Options

[EricBarbour]

All the indicia in the charts I've prepared show the same thing: since 2007 or later, participation is not merely flatlining, it's dropping.

And here's something even more disturbing, because it comes from the WMF itself.
Note that, for the first time since 2008, in 2011 all the indicia started to go down.
(Ever-increasing web traffic was always the most important part of the Wiki-Magic.
But now even that isn't working.)

[gomi]

I don't think that this solves the problem that is Wikipedia. Like Lenin, there are acolytes who will carefully tend the corpse of Wikipedia long after its demise, and it will be used to commit offenses far into the future.

[GlassBeadGame]

Moved off topic post to Thank You Mr. Know It All in the annex.

[communicat]

North America appears to be flat-lining, i.e. brain dead.

[EricBarbour]

I don't think that this solves the problem that is Wikipedia. Like Lenin, there are acolytes who will carefully tend the corpse of Wikipedia long after its demise, and it will be used to commit offenses far into the future.

Wikipedia will become like the Open Directory Project.
Completely closed, run by a small gang of totally insane nerds, hostile to outsiders. And used by no one.

It's one of the great mysteries of the web: why AOL and (whatever's left of) Netscape keep it online.
It's not very big, not updated very often, and not very comprehensive. Yet there it sits, year after year.

(Here's something to mull over: Wikipedia is obsessed with football, specifically Association football/soccer. It's the single largest subject area on Wikipedia. And if you look at dmoz's sports section, guess what the largest sports subject area is.)

[jd turk]

Wikipedia will become like the Open Directory Project.
Completely closed, run by a small gang of totally insane nerds, hostile to outsiders. And used by no one.

When you put it that way, we don't seem too far off.

[communicat]

Wikipedia will become like the Open Directory Project.
Completely closed, run by a small gang of totally insane nerds, hostile to outsiders. And used by no one.

When you put it that way, we don't seem too far off.

This post has been edited by communicat: Thu 20th October 2011, 8:47pm

[jd turk]

Wikipedia will become like the Open Directory Project.
Completely closed, run by a small gang of totally insane nerds, hostile to outsiders. And used by no one.

When you put it that way, we don't seem too far off.

Well, we're right on with the nerds and the hostility. Wikipedia is still widely used but people are becoming more and more aware that what they're reading very well could be incorrect crap. It'll take a while before it phases out of the public view. With the population as lazy as they are, it'll also probably take a widely-available alternative. Even with the internet, the majority of people don't want to have to do any research themselves.

[communicat]

I don't think that this solves the problem that is Wikipedia. Like Lenin, there are acolytes who will carefully tend the corpse of Wikipedia long after its demise, and it will be used to commit offenses far into the future.

WP will remain popular so long as there are people who enjoy being spoon-fed with predigested information; and also so long as there's an education system that stifles critical thinking and orignal research by allowing, even encouraging, student essays to plagairise WP material. Never mind that WP material itself is in a sense just one step removed from plagiarism by disallowing its own "editors" from engaging in critical thinking and OR.

This post has been edited by communicat: Fri 21st October 2011, 5:26pm

[Maetu]

(Here's something to mull over: Wikipedia is obsessed with football, specifically Association football/soccer. It's the single largest subject area on Wikipedia. And if you look at dmoz's sports section, guess what the largest sports subject area is.)

It's one of the few sports that has total world wide penetration.

[The Joy]

(Here's something to mull over: Wikipedia is obsessed with football, specifically Association football/soccer. It's the single largest subject area on Wikipedia. And if you look at dmoz's sports section, guess what the largest sports subject area is.)

It's one of the few sports that has total world wide penetration.

No, that's Wikimedia Commons!

[lilburne]

But they are adding really cool features all the time.

[everyking]

There's no significance in that slight drop, which covers only a few months of 2011. You can see previous points in the chart where traffic dropped for comparable periods.

[Tarc]

There's no significance in that slight drop, which covers only a few months of 2011. You can see previous points in the chart where traffic dropped for comparable periods.

Don't tap on the glass, you'll confuse the fish.

[Silver seren]

There's no significance in that slight drop, which covers only a few months of 2011. You can see previous points in the chart where traffic dropped for comparable periods.

That's exactly what I was thinking. There would have to be a sharper dip than that to prove a downward trend, though it does appear like the lines are leveling out.

[chrisoff]

WP will remain popular so long as there are people who enjoy being spoon-fed with predigested information; and also so long as there's an education system that stifles critical thinking and orignal research by allowing, even encouraging, student essays to plagairise WP material. Never mind that WP material itself is in a sense just one step removed from plagiarism by disallowing its own "editors" from engaging in critical thinking and OR.

Per Communicat (above)

Unique visitors by region

All that shows is that more people have internet access and click the wikipedia articles high on search engine lists. Don't necessarily read them. Just the lede maybe.

Says nothing about editors dropping off, or rate of article improvement/accuracy. Jimbo wants it to become an academic repository, gutting books of their contents and justifying that with a "citation". Books are better than FA articles.

I read the pedia just to see all the infighting and backbiting, the POV battles, the power trips, and the important things like no one wants to run for admin status.

Bored with editing it now. The FAC warriors are killing it. That is one ugly clique.



This post has been edited by chrisoff: Fri 28th October 2011, 7:04pm

[EricBarbour]

There's no significance in that slight drop, which covers only a few months of 2011. You can see previous points in the chart where traffic dropped for comparable periods.

That's exactly what I was thinking. There would have to be a sharper dip than that to prove a downward trend, though it does appear like the lines are leveling out.

If you gents knew what I know about editing patterns, you wouldn't be trying to rationalize it away.
Even the administrators are quitting in droves. And no one's talking about it---because the WMF
is deliberately keeping them on the admin rolls. Even the ones who disappeared years ago.

[Malleus]

There's no significance in that slight drop, which covers only a few months of 2011. You can see previous points in the chart where traffic dropped for comparable periods.

That's exactly what I was thinking. There would have to be a sharper dip than that to prove a downward trend, though it does appear like the lines are leveling out.

If you gents knew what I know about editing patterns, you wouldn't be trying to rationalize it away.
Even the administrators are quitting in droves. And no one's talking about it---because the WMF
is deliberately keeping them on the admin rolls. Even the ones who disappeared years ago.

So why not share what you know?

[radek]

WP will remain popular so long as there are people who enjoy being spoon-fed with predigested information; and also so long as there's an education system that stifles critical thinking and orignal research by allowing, even encouraging, student essays to plagairise WP material. Never mind that WP material itself is in a sense just one step removed from plagiarism by disallowing its own "editors" from engaging in critical thinking and OR.

Per Communicat (above)

Unique visitors by region

All that shows is that more people have internet access and click the wikipedia articles high on search engine lists. Don't necessarily read them. Just the lede maybe.

Says nothing about editors dropping off, or rate of article improvement/accuracy. Jimbo wants it to become an academic repository, gutting books of their contents and justifying that with a "citation". Books are better than FA articles.

I read the pedia just to see all the infighting and backbiting, the POV battles, the power trips, and the important things like no one wants to run for admin status.

Bored with editing it now. The FAC warriors are killing it. That is one ugly clique.

The image you want for editors is this one:



here it's pretty clear that at least the English Wiki is bleeding editors who are - potentially - doing something worthwhile like an innocent virgin beset by a horde of brain eating zombies (sorry, it is close to Halloween). The trend is the same, but less pronounced for editors with smaller number of edits per month but keep in mind that that statistic includes things like rate of vandalism etc.

The way the graph is scaled, with all individual Wikis slapped in together very much hides the extent of the problem. But basically for the English Wikipedia the number of active editors has gone down by about 20% since April 2008.

German and French wikipedias are more or less constant. Italian one has gone down, but that one has always had a lot of volatility so who knows (if you know anything about the business cycle of the Italian economy vis-a-vis the French and German one, this is actually sort of funny). Russian Wikipedia has been taking off though that's probably because widespread internet access there is relatively recent. Commons is also booming, but knowing what we know about Commons... is that a good thing?

For article creation look at this one



Here Spanish Wikipedia and, again, Russian, are looking good but the English one is decomposing faster than a corpse in left out in the Mexican desert. Again, the way they're presenting the data doesn't make it look that bad, but look at the axis and you see that the decline in new articles per day since March 2008 has been something like ... 45%. That's a FALL of 45%.

And some of the posters above are right in that it's also very possible that the composition of new articles created has changed. Currently something like 60% of all English Wikipedia articles are stubs. Out of those something like 10 to 15% are actually bot-created stubs (maybe even more). I don't have super concrete data on this right now (trying to collect some) but I very much suspect that the share of "stubs-which remain stubs for ever" in "new articles created" has gone up significantly over time.

So the graph above actually UNDERSTATES the decline in number of articles created per day/month, whatever (there is actually a bit of an upswing in the last few months, but again, it's too early to tell if that's real or some kind of "push" to offset the trend, or just plain old statistical noise in the data).

So based on that we know that the rate at which new articles are being created has fallen by AT LEAST 42% or so since March 2008 (and much more significantly so since 2007). You make an educated guess as to the extent to which bot-generated and Dr. Blofeld generated (is that a bot? not sure) stubs have replaced actual content-containing articles in the "new articles" pool and you get something like anywhere from 60% to 80% down.

And then there's the trend, which is strictly downward.


Also to quickly address everking's point. I do think that the original chart that Eric posted - which is really the original chart that Wikimedia posted, with all the caveats that entails - is not very informative. What you'd really want is unique visitors normalized by total web traffic. Ideally, something like "(unique visitors to Wikipedia)/(unique visitors to an average Website)". So if the number of unique visitors to Wikipedia is constant but the numerator has been going up, the fall in that graph would be much more dramatic.

[Tarc]

So based on that we know that the rate at which new articles are being created has fallen by AT LEAST 42% or so since March 2008 (and much more significantly so since 2007). You make an educated guess as to the extent to which bot-generated and Dr. Blofeld generated (is that a bot? not sure) stubs have replaced actual content-containing articles in the "new articles" pool and you get something like anywhere from 60% to 80% down.

And then there's the trend, which is strictly downward.

Is that necessarily a bad thing, though? Take any topic, let's say the Beatles. Editors have gone there over the years, created articles on the band, albums, tours, controversies, places, and influences. A Beatles fan comes along post-2008, and finds most everything he can think of to be covered already. Same with others, from WWII to Lost to Lady Gaga, perhaps there is a saturation point where there just isn't much new content to generate, therefore less editor participation.

Of course there are current events to write about, from the legitimate (Libyan revolution) to the asinine (anything the ARSEholes promote...listeria outbreaks, crazy guys who let exotic animals loose, Rebecca Black clones, etc...) but that has always been the case.