The fact that editing of Wikipedia is slowing is not surprising. It takes more expertise / dedication to write greater detail than to provide a brief overview. As the paper states "the low fruit have been picked".Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:10, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Right - Aren't we entering a phase where people now are working on improving existing articles rather than starting articles on less and less notable topics? Can anyone do an overview on what all the research over the past year or two has shown re: quality? -- Ssilvers (talk) 20:41, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I'll offer another theory, partly because I think it has a lot of validity, and partly to demonstrate that it may be very difficult to ever figure out why edits (and editors) peaked in early 2007 and have declined significantly since then. My theory is that since editing Wikipedia competes with other things that people can do on the Web, participation here has been impacted by the ever-increasing number of interesting things to do. One obvious example is the rise of social media such as Facebook. As importantly, all the other user-content-generated websites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.) have an obvious incentive to make it as easy as possible to participate (the more the participants, the more the audience, and thus more potential revenues), while Wikipedia does not. So, for example, in the 2007-2009 period, prior to usability initiative, almost nothing was done to improve ease of editing; in fact, as infobox and template usage continued to expand, the initial user editing experience almost certainly became more difficult. -- John Broughton(♫♫) 20:20, 4 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A very interesting theory, which takes as a premise that people edit Wikipedia because they are bored. Now certainly our top editors get more out of it, but boredom (or escape from real life work) is certainly a gateway to editing.HereToHelp(talk to me) 18:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
One fact seems to have been missed by students of Wikipedia so far, & I confess I only thought of it a few days ago: if we compare the numbers of Wikipedia users against editors, the share of users who became editors has been shrinking for some time -- even more dramatically than any other yardstick. (Even if the number of editors remain steady or increased slightly, the share obviously must have shrunk as our Alexa rank increased.) However, the actual curve remains to be determined, & whether the inflection points on this curve have any value. -- llywrch (talk) 19:18, 3 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
