Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-03/Editing stats

There will always be both fluctuations in activity (in part dependent upon "topics in the news" and other incentives to do something) and individual declines in participation (once one has "seen to" most of the articles one is interested in).

However - trawling through 'list of articles from (insert date)' (as with several of the Open Task lists) can be time consuming. Would it be feasible to create something similar to the Random Plot Generator [1] - which finds 'several' articles requiring improvement under particular categories? Jackiespeel (talk) 15:32, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Usage changes don't necessarily equal deterioration

Just a "keep your chin up" note. I think that the usage changes that are being measured don't mean that Wikipedia is going to go away. It will just go through different phases of development. The kinds of activity that were needed during the initial ramp-up may be different from the kinds of activity that will define the mature phases. The "initial filling of the vacuum" era is tapering off, but the "maintaining and improving the content" era is only just gradually dawning. — ¾-10 19:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Agree with the above. Another possibility: all human knowledge has now been captured: WE ARE WIKIPEDIA. Now it's just a case of keeping up-to-speed with current events... Tim Ruddell (talk) 19:14, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I can vouch for the fact that in my particular areas of content interest, there is still a lot of human knowledge that is absent from WP; but it's more related to better explaining the topics already broached than to introducing new topics. Most of the "easy moves" have already been made, and what's left is more challenging. So I agree with Tim in that although there are still content gaps, we are definitely headed in the general direction of what he said. My way of saying it would be "most topics have now been broached. Now it's just a case of elaborating on them." — ¾-10 00:06, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Three-quarter-ten. What s/he calls the mature phases will attract a different sort of editor, and attitudes to people who persistently add unverified facts to articles will harden, so that probably means fewer, longer edits by increasingly "professional" editors. In terms of statistics, the move towards inline citations makes a significant difference to editor productivity as measured by edit counts. It can take hours to find references to support material that pervious editors have inserted. In doing this, the content gets improved too, but my impression is that the volume of citations is increasing much faster than the volume of content. For example:

• The 01.01.08 version of Marie Curie has 1767 words with 2 citations to 2 footnotes.
• The 01.01.09 version of Marie Curie has 3825 words with 43 citations to 35 footnotes.

In one year the content doubled but the number of citations increased twenty times. By "words" I mean words in the article text and headings, excluding the TOC, infobox, image captions, citations, references, and the "See also", "Further reading", "Fiction", "References" and "External links" sections. I chose this article "at random" as one where no new material (discovery, biography, announcement) would have triggered rewriting. - Pointillist (talk) 13:10, 7 February 2009 (UTC)