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[edit] Hey, Where You Been

It's been well over a year since the English Wikipedia issued any official, public usage statistics [1]. The official reason has been technical difficulties (math is hard, let's go shopping!). No matter that this explanation has all the credibility of a "wardrobe malfunction"; as with most everything in the wacky, user-created content world of Wikicraft, it is up to the peons to rise to the challenge and fill in the missing data points.

Which is exactly what one brave lil' number-crunching Tin Soldier has done. And the results show a capital "B" which rhymes with "Axis X,Y and Z" and that stands for BELL CURVE. Yes, that spells trouble right here in Wiki-city.

Amongst other things, the results show that:

The most surprising result is that the activity of the Wikipedia community appears to have been declining during the last 6 months.The rate at which edits were being made to Wikipedia articles appears to have peaked in February to April 2007 and declined since. This decline is unprecedented in Wikipedia's history, which has been marked by nearly exponential growth during much of its history. As discussed below, several other statistics show declines beginning around the same period. Though it may be purely coincidental, this time frame also corresponds to the Essjay controversy appearing in the press.

You don't say!

Article creation plateaued in early 2006 after unregistered users were prohibited from creating new articles following the Seigenthaler controversy, but the overall rate has not noticeably declined. Like the overall edit rate, the rate of new account creation peaked in early 2007 and has declined ~30% since. Image deletions have increased as a result of recent efforts to more strictly enforce the criteria for non-free content.

This data verifies what we up here in the WikiTruth Tower(tm) have been ranting, raving, preaching and praying about since long before Jimbo got his new birthday. The bloom is clearly off the rose, the honeymoon over, the cherry popped, the shark jumped and the Britney sheared on Wikipedia.

When an organism or organization stops growing it stagnates, declines and falls. The larger the organism or organization gets the greater the thud when it finally touches ground. Wikipedia has become one humumgoid leviathan, far too big for its own or anyone elses' good. It must keep moving, growing and ingesting krill into its shitstem or end up as one helluva smelly carcass on the beach. When this happens, we're be sure to hold a solemn vigil in the form of a moment of silence, then holding our noses we shall place c-4 packs underneath the beast's husk and issue a collective Nelson laugh at the resulting hilarity.

This opinion does not win us friends, and has caused some interesting e-mails to come our way.

[edit] Lies, Damned lies and Statistics

The study's author, Dragon's flight, must be getting a tiny taste of this now too. None other than Arch Wiki-apologist and water sport enthusiast Gmaxwell has taken up arms against his work, even going so far as to slap one of those cute lil factual accuracy tags on it. TAKE THAT, BEOTCH!

When another peon conducted another independent study of edit frequency and the results supported Dragon's findings, Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head as well.

"The pedia's not in decline", he argues, "it's just not growing as fast!" Yes, and that parrot's not dead, it's just resting after a long squawk.

Not caring much for the numbers in Dragon-boy's report, Gmax decided to make his own claiming them to be the "Real" Ghostbusters. Of course it too clearly shows a downward trend, only not as drastic and at a higher level. Oh silly Gmax, instead of arguing about numbers and methods, why not simply accept that the Space Plane is experiencing turbulence, try and find the causes and decide what must be done to put things back on course before the Warp Core explodes? But, alas, that would require far too many peeps to go cold turkey on the Flavor-Aid.

It may be naive to still hope for positive reform from within at this point. If that is the case then we must start planning for a counter-revolution or a giant salvage operation or a way to cash in on what little quality content and respectability Wikipedia still has left [2]. Thank goodness for our friend, the GFDL, which ensures that the biases and flaws of Wikipedia will end up in the public realm for the next century.

At least, the trend appears to be that way...