Comments on: Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down

By: The Rise and Fall of The Wiki Empire « BlogCampaigning

The Rise and Fall of The Wiki Empire « BlogCampaigning — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:13:43 +0000

[...] to be popular, and will be updated and maintained as necessary. This decline in growth is not, as a commenter on TechCrunch thinks (second comment after the post), a sign of the end of Web [...]

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:28:12 +0000

If the deletionists would lighten up they would stop chasing away new users.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:23:13 +0000

Is it possible that the site is just becoming saturated? I mean, there does come a point where many if not most of the articles can be said to be “done”. There’s only so much that can possibly be said on “light saber dueling”, and there’s only so many TV shows that were produced in the 80’s.

Two or three years ago, I was finding lots of stuff to edit. Mostly clarity and grammar, but I’d often stumble across articles that seemed incomplete, based on my knowledge of the subject. These days though… well it’s been a long time since I’ve had anything substantial to add to an article.

By: J Gruszynski

J Gruszynski — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 18:08:35 +0000

One look at the graphs and you see a power-law characteristic which is perhaps to be expected - it’s common in social networks. So two things:

1) It’s an inherent property to slow the number of new authors because there is a growth rule for competitive scale-free networks that favors incumbents so it’s feature of the system for authors as a percentage of total visitors to decline, and

2) The admins at Wiki have been changing the rules for authoring which now require academic-style references/footnotes for articles which creates a need more time and commitment for authoring than before. Given most folks have only so many hours in a day the number of authors will naturally decline.

Ergo: the apparent drop in authors is neither surprising nor even meaningful. On two counts!

Sigh. Suffering idiots is such a chore.

By: An Unquiet Mind

An Unquiet Mind — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 11:18:26 +0000

Weekend Flea Market 13-Oct-07…

The Friday Flea Market is now open all weekend! An assortment of stuff I came across in cyberspace, offered second hand, for anyone who may be interested.

Wired Magazine has a very interesting article on how racial profiling can be used in forensics w…

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 23:49:52 +0000

What are you saying about the developer community here on the east coast?

By: Neil Kelty

Neil Kelty — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:10:28 +0000

Many schools block wikipedia, which would result in quite a drop in traffic.

By: HELM, WHM/cPanel, Windows, Linux and SEO Blog » Blog Archive » SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 12, 2007

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:11:14 +0000

[...] Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down, TechCrunch [...]

By: -gary

-gary — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:46:57 +0000

I once worked for a company that became the focus of some anomocity for years from a “foundation” rights holder. Basicaly, the foundation owned some copyrights and trademarks for one model of a product, while we owned some IP on another model. They had lost control of our model years earlier and had tried unsuccessfully to get it back.

Anyway, I would go in to add and update information on the companies model (this was years after I had worked there BTW) since I had some inside knowledge. Members of the foundation watch over the entry like a hawk, so they would revert my changes. I would revert them back. They would go in and change “lawsuit” to “notification”. Fine, I can live with that for the sake of not arguing. Over time, they would slowly remove all of my addtions until they were nonexistent. I would redo them and start the process all over. Eventually, I gave up. It’s not worth the effort on my part.

How WP exists today is how the gangs that control entries want them to exist. If you have any slightly different perspective (factual, not emotional) than the controlling gang, forget ever trying to get your contributions to stick.

Run off enough new people, and eventually it will become the stagnant site that it was destined to become in the first place.

By: Flash The Ripper

Flash The Ripper — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:38:31 +0000

I can’t believe. They attach an rel=”nofollow” attribute to the every outbounding link in the Wikipedia articles, and then wonder why people lose interest in writing articles. Thus marking each link to other sites as spam. Not decreasing the spam at all. Losing people, who believed in link love.

I predict: Wordpress blogging soon will die, if Wordpress won’t drop out the rel=”nofollow” by default.

By: Profy.Com

Profy.Com — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:18:13 +0000

Wikipedia Showing Slower Growth? So What?…

In the past couple of days, TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld and Duncan Riley have posted information and thoughts on Wikimedia Foundation’s announced relocation, with Eric publishing the facts and Duncan later postulating the reasons behind th…

By: Amy Wilsch

Amy Wilsch — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:28:37 +0000

I use Wikipedia all the time, but now only as a reader. I tried multiple times to post various add-ons to existing articles and got every single one rejected (sometimes within seconds of posting, after doing research for my sources). Then I’d go and find something almost exactly alike on the site for something else, and point it out and ask why mine was rejected when that one was there, and the answer was always the same “I don’t know anything about why that post got posted, but I’m removing yours for violation.” I’d point out that if that’s the case then the other post is in violation too and they’d give the same stupid answer that they don’t know anything about that post and I wanted to complain I’d have to take it up in the general whatever. I said I didn’t want to remove that information, I just wanted to ADD mine. Made NO sense.

The self-coronated editors are smug, annoying, unreasonable, make no ogical arguments nor do they make sense.

Bring back Larry S. He’s more philosophical and more reasonable anyway.

By: Fake Richard

Fake Richard — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:26:17 +0000

Yesterdays post showed traffic dip down for Facebook.

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

By: JPElectron

JPElectron — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:44:41 +0000

This might have more to do with users/the general public who have “lost faith” or gotten frustrated when almost every new page you start they just end up deleting after a few days - I think it’s turned into a real crap-shoot of a few VIP members who police the whole thing.

By: MIKE

MIKE — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:51:36 +0000

The foundation (company) is placing more effort towards the development of Wikia and Wikia Search. So the nonprofit end of the company suffers a bit in the interim.
Take a look at some of the Wiki’s in the Wikia side of the business. That end is growing.

My concern is their “jobs board” only ever shows one listing. For now I suggest the search project is stalled or slowed at least. Maybe they have a plan to partner up with a search company once they get settled into the new digs.
I like Wikipedia, as well I enjoy watching Wikia grow.

By: tomer

tomer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:14:07 +0000

a new look at wikis…maybe they’re not dead yet ; )

http://www.qwiktionary.com

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:01:43 +0000

MS Cloud MScropediac on the way to save you people!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

By: GerardM

GerardM — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:51:22 +0000

It is the English language Wikipedia that the statistics are compiled for. The Wikimedia Foundation is not the English language Wikipedia. Just the other day Commons had its two millionth file. It is one of the more relevant repositories of free quality images. There are over 250 other Wikipedias that wished they had the same “issues” as the en.wikipedia.

Really, when you look at the numbers it is insane that things grew as they did. So there are less new articles.. Well, there are plenty of articles that is worked on.

When you write about the English Wikipedia PLEASE do not equate it as being the same as the WMF.. it is not.

Thanks,
GerardM

By: Jerke Wadde

Jerke Wadde — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:48:58 +0000

Wikipedia’s slowdown probably mostly has to do with it’s aggressive push to eliminate what it calls “Original Research”, or uncited facts. An awful lot of submissions are being deleted as such.

So Wikipedia is no longer the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit”.

By: Remi

Remi — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:04:19 +0000

It seems healthy to me. It seems the chaos there before was a little much for the general population. Things appear to be a bit more relaxed, laid back. Perhaps, Wikipedia is becoming bit more adoptable by the mainstream.

By: magnusdopus

magnusdopus — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:48:44 +0000

There’s a number of factors going on here.
1. I think the decision to adopt the nofollow parameter on external links is backfiring against Wikipedia. Nofollow basically tells search crawlers like Google not to use those links when determining page rank. At one point, bloggers and SEO types benefitted from creating content because they could also add their own links. Couple that with a faction that seems hell bent on erasing all external links and corporate influence and you are left with individuals who have purely altruistic motives. The few, the proud. The antiseptic.

2. Web 2.0 tech, web 1.0 site. As a person developing a site based on MediaWiki, I know it’s a fantastic piece of technology, ideally suited for supporting widgets, maps, video etc. But the Wikipedia culture seems bent on keeping things text only. http://wikimapia.org/ - should be part of Wikipedia.

3. Agreed that people ultimately get bored of generating quality UGC. People depend on feedback mechanisms. In Wikipedia, they have the ‘editor’ role but it requires signficant contribution time. Apparently (see ref
) getting this takes thousands of edits.

Overall the problem is that Wikipedia is starting to resemble the US too much : too many quick buck artists, a vested group that is too conservative, and just over saturation of everything.

Now for a shameless but deserved plug…

If you are one of the disenfranchised Wikipedians and any of what I said rings true come check out http://www.wikipop.net/ . It looks horrible now I know, but with just a little love, an investor or 2… who knows.

By: sputnick

sputnick — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:45:04 +0000

Thank you very much for picking up on this. But I disagree with the conclusion reached on the basis of the data. The number of edits is not necessarily a good way of judging vibrancy. It just means that the encyclopedia has become more complete as more knowledge has been poured into it, and that articles have matured. Once an article is pretty much complete, what can you do about it except protect it from vandalism?

If you are judging growth and vibrancy, I think the one criteria that matters is the number of new articles, rather than anything related to edits.

By: Johnathan

Johnathan — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:21:24 +0000

I love Wikipedia!

By: Yohay

Yohay — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:10:52 +0000

Well, after the astronomical growth, Wikipedia has settled down. It has become a truly reliable source of information. It’s saturated.

By: Tan The Man

Tan The Man — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:01:12 +0000

Lack of credibility? Could it be that students aren’t getting away with using wikipedia as a paper source anymore? It’s the first thing they ever talk about in regards to their expectations/rules.