[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

I've been taking an extended wiki-break during the last 6 weeks, but during that time I've also reflected on the state of Wikipedia. Rather than simply relying on my own observations, I started asking questions and went looking for statistical answers. As many of you are probably aware, the statistics package hosted at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm has not been updated in about a year due to the failure of all recent attempts to create a complete database dump for enwiki. Given the lack of any recent official stats, I set out to generate my own using a dump of the Wikipedia log files and by systematically downloading (over many days) the history page contents for 100,000 articles. My analysis from doing this gave me a big surprise. Since early this year, and for the first extended period in Wikipedia's history, the activity rate of the Wikipedia community has been declining. This can be seen in the rate of editing articles (-17%), the rate of new account registration (-25%), blocks (-30%), protections (-30%), uploads (-10%), article deletions (-25%), etc. Some exceptions are the article creation rate (+25%) and image deletions (+80%), but overall the community appears to be doing less now than it was 6 months ago. Given Wikipedia's long history of nearly exponential growth, any decline in our editing rate is surprising, but I also find the sharpness of the turn-around to be remarkable. Though it may merely be coincidence, the timing of the change is near the breaking of the Essjay story in the news. At the same time the frequency of reverts (as a fraction of all article edits) continues to increase, while administrators now devote more than 1/3 of their article space edits to making reverts. For charts and additional information see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis I'm not going to launch into an extended discussion of what's wrong with Wikipedia, but I do think we need to be paying attention to these trends and taking steps to intervene where possible. -Robert Rohde aka Dragons_flight