

Wikipedia edits apparently declining, peaked in early 2007 - pg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis

======
Alex3917
The declining number of edits isn't the biggest problem, but rather the
declining number of intelligent edits. Intelligent people flock to whatever
the most interesting thing going on is. In ancient Greece, intelligent people
flocked to philosophy. In the renaissance, it was art and humanities. In early
US history it was politics.

The problem is that people get bored and move on. The most intelligent people
in society are no longer interested in politics. Which is why politicians
today suck.

The most interesting thing going on today is tech, and within tech for a
couple years it was Wikipedia. A couple years ago if you went into the
Wikimedia IRC channels it was a mix of famous VCs, bestselling authors, and
14-year-old kids who spoke a dozen languages. Today it's just a bunch of bored
librarians. The core community is off starting companies and writing books and
whatnot.

It wouldn't surprise me if a sizable chunk of former core Wikipedians were now
reading this site instead of making edits.

~~~
pg
Intelligent people didn't just flock to art and the humanities in the
Renaissance. They also flocked to math and engineering and finance. The reason
we now think of Renaissance people doing art is that their art is better than
ours and is still the big draw in museums, whereas they don't have anything to
teach us about engineering.

~~~
Alex3917
Excellent point. Do you think the basic premise, that intelligent people flock
to intellectually interesting things (but that those things change over time)
is reasonable?

It seems to me that when our system of government was new it really was the
most interesting thing going on so it attracted a lot of super smart people.
Now, not so much. Of course part of it is that politicians have figured out
it's easier to get elected if you pander to the lowest common denominator, but
that still doesn't explain why a good percentage of them don't know how to use
email.

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ivankirigin
I wonder what this means about the amount of available human knowledge
combined with the minimal interest with pure moral payoff needed to make an
edit.

Topics that fill books are given a few pages on Wikipedia. Niche content sites
like MathWorld are usually much more in depth, but targeted at experts.

But I think it's important the point out that a peak in rate of edits doesn't
mean the content stops growing.

~~~
iamwil
I think you're probably partially right on this one. Most wikipedia articles
are fairly shallow compared to treaties dedicated to the topic. That's not a
bad thing, as I usually use wikipedia articles as an introduction to a topic
I'm not familiar with at all.

However, that means for those topics, people will have to start learning more
in-depth things to contribute, or the experts will have to start contributing.

I don't think there's a limit to human knowledge. It might just be an
indication that there's nothing new going on recently. Once a new field or
topic opens up, I think we should see another explosion of edits.

In the meantime, it'd be interesting to see the edit rates for the other
wikifactions, like wikitextbooks, wikiquotes, wikitionary, etc. Maybe the
activities have just moved over there.

If this talk on lexicography is any indication, there's still a lot of work to
be done in other knowledge domains.
<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/161>

One of the points of the talk was that dictionaries need to be updated in form
--it's been the same since Queen Victoria I. <http://www.confusingwords.com/>
was a related website that I stumbled upon soon after. It'd be interesting if
wikitionary would be able to incorporate not just meanings of words, but new
connections between words, besides just being related in meaning.

~~~
brianfrank
Beauty. Thanks pg for finding a "concrete example" that iamwil wanted to
support my post yesterday on 'web3.0' (or whatever it should be called).

If wikipedia is really serious about growing, they might do well to start
figuring out how to progress from being merely a place to manage existing
knowledge, towards being a vehicle/engine for developing/creating _new_
knowledge.

Why wait around for new fields to open up? Start encouraging users to stick
around and do it there...

------
staunch
Not a judgment, just an uneducated guess: Perhaps it's because Jimmy Whales
and some of his people are focusing on Wikia, Inc these days?

I don't think it'd be hard to get more contributors to Wikipedia. Even after
all these years you _still_ have to be a geek to really use it, which is a
total disgrace IMHO.

------
mynameishere
It's mature. At some point, a lot of articles become "done", or at least
beyond the point of needing constant revisions.

