These two graphs are taken from the statistics at stats.wikimedia.org, using data up until 31 July 2009. The trends for other languages not shown in the graphs varies considerably, but for the English version of Wikipedia there are clear – and long running – signs of stagnation and decline when it comes to the generation and maintenance of content. (Click on either graph to view a larger version.)
Number of active Wikipedians
Red line = English. The other lines are German, Japanese and French.
Number of edits per day
Darker colour lines are rolling averages with
same colour scheme as in first graph.
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I think you’ve missed the obvious point here that encyclopaedias are not rewritten every few years, they are incremental works the great majority of which will remain valid for a long time.
You might perhaps be judging Wikipedia rather too harshly according to the principles of the internet rather than taking into account the nature of such information sources.
Not everything has to be new to be good!
There’s certainly some truth in that, but new information in the world is still being generated at a great rate, and indeed the estimates I’ve seen are that it is being created at an accelerating rate. Against that trend, the Wikipedia flat/falling trend is striking.
Ah yes but this is the English versus American dichotomy. They have information, we have knowledge.
Why worry about adding to Wikipedia when current articles on simple concepts are eroding? I’m personally tired of
“For much of the earth’s population, the sun rises in the east. “CITATION NEEDED”"
It will be a useless relic in some university archive project if it continues like this.
[...] previously blogged about how some of the key statistics for Wikipedia suggest the site is stagnating or declining. This picture is reinforced by new evidence: A sharp drop in Wikipedians, the volunteers who write [...]