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Has Wikipedia Peaked?
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."
All you have to do is compare the entries for "Klingon Language" or "Jedi" or "Pokemon" with "Albania" or "Australia" or "Shakespeare", then ask yourself why?
What crap.
Neil
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
"Are you one of those kids trying to masquerade as adults by being pretentious about which subjects are considered "worthy" by some ill-defined criteria? Your selection of topics to try out could indicate that. If so, I suggest you grow up."
:-) I certainly wouldn't consider a bloody essay on Wikipedia was either wanted or warranted.
Oh contraire, I suspect, as you obviously consider reams & reams of puerile drivel about gaming cards "Worthy", you need to remove your nappy.
OK, I can accept, that for the average 20 year old furry-toothed geek, Pokemon cards are the only way to meet other furry-toothed geeks. But listing, in mind-numbing detail, the pro's & con's of imaginary attributes, for characters in a set of poxy gaming cards, is beyond the pale.
As a teenager in the early 1970's I admit to playing a German version of what has become "Top Trumps", but purely to win cash, sweets, cigarettes or marbles
Don't get me started on Klingon.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
So, you'd like to live in the Wild West? Robberies, murders, disease. Sounds great huh? Well, it does to the overly-romanticizing imagination of someone who has the luxury of living in a time when those things are just story, not reality, and only wants to think of the advantages and none of the downsides. This is not to say that all systems must be authoritarian. But a balance needs to be struck. There need to be rules. Really, there do. Sometimes there are too many, sometimes there are not enough.
But, hey, wouldn't it be great if we could just do what we wanted, without caring about fact checking or consistency? Yeah! ...Until nine out of ten articles are about garage bands, hoaxes, and bored teenagers.
Wikipedia has a reasonable number of rules. Yes, it does require a learning curve. But, honestly, is there anything worth doing that doesn't? The community is usually pretty forgiving about well-intentioned mistakes.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.