With over two million articles to its name, the English-language edition of Wikipedia is far from dead. But new statistics indicate that it may be hurt, as participation has dropped in almost every way possible.
Robert Rohde (AKA “Dragons_flight”) deserves credit for spotting this trend; official Wikipedia stats have been unavailable for some time, so Rohde dug into the site’s log files and history pages. Here’s what he found:
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.
Graphs supporting these findings are available on Wikipedia itself.
It may be that recent arguments and scandals have hurt the community; heated disputes aren’t always the best way to attract new members or encourage participation. On the other hand, perhaps Wikipedia is simply all grown up – most trends top out eventually.
Just the same, with its impending move to San Francisco and an integration with Yahoo oneSearch, it looks like Wikipedia is trying to reverse the downward slide.
