Has Wikipedia Peaked? 484
An anonymous reader writes "After more than a year with no official statistics, an independent analysis reported Wednesday showed that activity in Wikipedia's community has been declining over the last six months. Editing is down 20% and new account creation is down 30%. After six years of rapid growth and more than 2 million articles, is Wikipedia's development now past its peak? Are Wikipedians simply running out of things to write about, or is the community collapsing under the weight of external vandalism and internal conflicts? A new collection of charts and graphs help to tell the tale."
The answer is basically "No". (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Answers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, I can't even argue with them because it says things like "However, extreme summer humidity often boosts the heat index to around 110 F (43 C)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami,_Florida [wikipedia.org] Try as I might, I could find no information on historic heat indexes in Miami on the web. The best I could find was high-low temperature and humidity charts, and since the heat index deals with the temperature and humidity at any given moment, it isn't very useful for calculating the heat index after the fact. Especially if you want to find out how often it hits 110.
Just about everything I've looked up on Wikipedia in the last month has been someone's personal view with no facts to sustain it. As a starting point for research, I can't even say it's a good idea because things are stated as fact that are personal observation (anecdotes) or opinion, and that can quickly taint your view of whatever you are searching and lead you down a bad path.
It's nearing "completion" (Score:4, Informative)
The days when e.g. you could discover that there was no article at all about the author Jessamyn West ("The Friendly Persuasion") and quickly throw in three paragraphs off the top of your head with a little bit of cross-checking, totally confident that you were improving Wikipedia, are gone.
Now, improving Wikipedia is hard work, and it's less fun, and it goes slowly.
In other words, it's now about quality, not quantity... and that's a Good Thing.
Statistics in context (Score:4, Informative)
As far as Wikipedia - it was a great idea by Larry Sanger, a "Web 2.0" encyclopedia built on wiki technology. This little R&D project by Sanger then gets taken over by the boss of the company, Jimbo Wales, who takes all the credit, and nowadays is concentrating on Wikia, while the project is being run by a mostly incompetent and increasingly nasty cabal. In a lot of ways, Wikipedia has survived despite the management due to Sanger's great idea and the normal user base. Right now it is successful because it is the only game in town, but I am quite sure that it will be knocked off the block by a competitor in the future.
Re:Wikiphobia (Score:3, Informative)
As for your weather query, might I suggest weather underground's history search? It was on the first page of a Google search for weather (below a bunch of basketball links for Miami Heat). The history function will give you the hourly temp and humidity values. You'll have to do it day by day, but a decent script should be able to scrape the data, then you can do the math and get all the information you need.
Re:The problem is "completed" articles (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen that done. I've even done it myself. Problem is, much of the reverted content tends to be unencyclopedic, e.g. paragraphs which guide the reader into how to do things, and spelling tends to be argued over a lot, sometimes causing repeat edits without any discussion until both/all involved are already pretty annoyed. I try to be as polite as possible when reverting, especially so when the contributors appear to believe that they've been adding significant content. First edits don't always point to the potential of the editor, so scaring them off isn't a good idea. Sometimes people just have to be nudged into reading some of the helpful tips on how to contribute.
The situation tends to be hard to improve when almost all the edits making the article worse are single edits from logged IPs.
I've had to consistently revert something approaching those 95% you mentioned of all edits done on a particular article, since most are guide-edits/incorrect spelling changes/blatant advertisments/irrelevant/vandalism/etc. done to a largely already complete article. I try to re-write edits when the information they add happens to be useful, despite being badly or clumsily written.
Re:Answers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I partly blame the "validators" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Woah! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it's here: Wikipedia:Requested articles [wikipedia.org].