We posted yesterday on the move by the Wikimedia Foundation to relocate from Florida to San Francisco, but aside from the obvious conclusions that the move would allow Wikimedia to tap into the superior developer community out West, there may be another reason as well: a mid life slow down.
It’s tempting to call it a mid-life crisis, but it’s far too bland for that label. Robert Rohde has put together a statistical analysis on Wikipedia activity and has discovered that things are rapidly slowing down on Wikipedia after years of astronomical growth.
According to Rohde, since the beginning of the year the rate of editing articles has declined 17%, new account registrations are down 25%, user blocks are down 30%, article protection is down 30%, uploads are down 10% and article deletions are down 25%.
Rohde also has also put together some graphs here that show that an increasing number of edits are reverts (now at 20%) as opposed to the addition of new material, which he aptly calls “Unproductive Article Edits.”
i know this is not relevant but may i add to the world (again) that wikipedia’s b.lo.cked in the ppl’s rep of chi.na. but it’s cool. i miss wikepedia but life goes on.
this may become a sign of things to come.. UGC are not as appealing or as satisfying as it used to be. add this w/ the dip in traffic on facebook could be the beginning of the end for web 2.0?
“superior developer community”
Little arrogant of you isn’t it Duncan? It’s larger but I doubt it’s necessarily superior. Not everything superior emanates from Silicon Valley. In fact there seems to be an endless supply of drivel from that little valley.
PXlated
I was thinking Superior in terms of numbers, not that they are necessarily better or worse than developers elsewhere, and you cant dispute the fact that there are likely more developers per square mile in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the US.
There have been numerous spinoff sites of WikiPedia which are doing fairly well in themselves.
I just bumped into one called CryptoDox — http://cryptodox.com/, which focuses only on cryptography.
The site looks nice and the focus is there. Lets see how such sites do in competing with Wikipedia.
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.
Well, after the astronomical growth, Wikipedia has settled down. It has become a truly reliable source of information. It’s saturated.
I love Wikipedia!
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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
MS Cloud MScropediac on the way to save you people!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
a new look at wikis…maybe they’re not dead yet ; )
http://www.qwiktionary.com
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.
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.
Yesterdays post showed traffic dip down for Facebook.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
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.
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.
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.
Many schools block wikipedia, which would result in quite a drop in traffic.
What are you saying about the developer community here on the east coast?
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.
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.
If the deletionists would lighten up they would stop chasing away new users.