Wikipedia chart of the "unsustainable" decline in administrator participation:<p><a href="http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editors#Chapter_Three:_The_future_.282007-present.29" rel="nofollow">http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Wikimedia_Editor...</a><p>This relates to how much editorial attention each article can get as the number of articles grows. This has implications for Wikipedia's goal<p><a href="http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Improve_Content_Quality" rel="nofollow">http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...</a><p>of improving content quality.
Anybody recognize that the number of articles stopped increasing after a couple of years?<p>As of today it is virtually impossible for a new wikipedia author to add a new article to the german Wikipedia. It will be deleted within a blink.<p>But hey, if this means that the world knowledge is asymptotically converging to a maximum, there is hope that we'll someday know it all, after all.<p>-jsl
These charts just don't feel right without Hans Rosling jumping up and down in front of them like a little kid.<p>For the baffled: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI</a>
It's interesting to see that en.wp was the only project that experienced quadratic growth in the number of articles. en.wp and de.wp were pretty close in size until the start of 2006, when en.wp took off and de.wp continued with more or less linear growth.<p>I'm aware that the english speaking world is larger than the german speaking one, and that a feedback effect exists in large networks with little downtime (ie, no time of the day where contribution dies off, due to the geographical dispersion of english-speaking countries), but I'm still surprised that en.wp was the <i>only</i> project to experience quadratic growth.
Take it out of log view. It seems like languages quickly get to about 100,000 articles in a very short (relatively time span). I wonder if that's because there are a few hundred thousand universal articles and which they are.
I'm pretty surprised by a number of things here. First and foremost, how popular Polish and Catalan are. Secondly, I thought that there would be vastly more English articles than any other language, and this isn't the case.