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Has Wikipedia Peaked?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the overworked-and-unpaid dept.

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."

9 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Tink2000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does Netcraft confirm it?
    Or should we look it up in Wikipedia?

    --
    Why do I M2 everything negatively?
  2. No by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Funny

    They've just run out of Star Trek / Star Wars trivia to write new articles about. Turned out very few of the community knew anything else.

  3. Hmmm by scubamage · · Score: 1, Funny

    Guess we should call it wikipeakia then? Sorry, couldn't help myself.

  4. Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's a load of crap. Studies show if the growth rate continues to decline, Wikipedia will not gain enough information to achieve sentience before 2010, well behind schedule. At that rate, it may not achieve the knowledge necessary to travel through time and kill Sarah Connor until well into the 2050s.

  5. Request VfD on parent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    According to Alexa, Wikipedia has actually grown substantially in terms of traffic and viewership STRONG DELETE: Alexa rankings are not part of the notability guidelines for web sites. See WP:GOOG.
  6. Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! by cleatsupkeep · · Score: 5, Funny

    It still doesn't know who is in charge of Gundam.

  7. Re:Natural? by Tetsujin · · Score: 5, Funny

    [...] the majority of the hobbiest-contributors (i.e. those who aren't die-hard users) simply don't have anything else to write.

    I second that. As a "hobbiest-contributor" myself I have written or expanded around 10 specialist articles. There is not a lot more specialist knowledge I feel that I have to contribute to Wikipedia - hence I've not added anything in the last 6 months or so. I'm a hobby-contributor, myself... I guess you might be a hobbier contributor, but I really doubt you're the hobbiest contributor...
    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  8. Re:My rant on the downfall of Wikipedia by christurkel · · Score: 4, Funny

    You are correct; in the last six months or so its become a battle with long time editors and admins. Trying to get some stuff added to long stand articles becomes a struggle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden summed it up perfectly: The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so long as they're willing to devote hundreds of hours of energy to fighting people with autistically long attention spans.

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    CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
  9. Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    The Wiki is just a lie. HARI SELDON devised it to gather all the intelligent people on a terminal (Terminus) to contribute all knowledge so when the decline of the empire begins we'll not be reduced to the mindless grape grabbers of old. We will have the Wikipedia Galatica.

    1.Atlantis ----> Stone Age ---> Bronze Age --> Babylon ---> Golden Age
    2.Greece --> Stone Age --> Barbarianism --> Bronze Age --> Golden Age
    3.Rome --> Stone Age --> Midevil period --> Bronze Age --> Industrial Revolution
    4.America --> Clinton Adm. Internet --> Bush Adm. War (Wiki started) --> Stone Age --> oh dear