User talk:Ancheta Wis/o

Why the growth in Wikipedia article count is starting to tail off: one opinion

As a logistic curve, the growth in article count is starting to tail off. Ward Cunningham predicted this at Wikimania in 2006. I would suggest to WikiDashboard's Ed Chi that a limiting factor in the growth in the article count in the encyclopedia is the length of an individual editor's watchlist.

My personal experience is that as a constructivist, I have had to limit the length of my watchlist to less than 75. Any more than that leads to more misery for this editor. In the jungle that is Wikipedia, a new article faces deletion — any edit to it must contribute to its 'fight to survive' or must transform it enough to 'blend in the scenery'. I would guess that watchlist sizes are of similar magnitude (i.e., not thousands) for other constructivist editors who monitor well-trafficked pages. Currently a watchlist is private to the editor, so that the watchlist cannot be gamed by vandals, who must then assume that the vast majority of articles is under the watchful eye of someone. The net result is that about half of 75, or 35 items will show up in my watchlist at any given time. For this editor, admittedly a sample of one, the number of items in my watchlist report is currently: Assuming that one can use information like Ed Chi's statistics, e.g., 50% of all edits are by core editors, this suggests that the maximum number of manageable articles is less than * *<%articles tended by core editors>*.

Thus a maximum number of manageable articles suggests there is an upper limit on the success of any project which is trying to increase its quality, for example by flagged revisions. Before watchlists assumed their critical role, Recent changes was small enough that the community could monitor it and jump in to work on an article together, as late as 2003.

So (for manageable articles) if we plug in numbers, averages, or estimates we get

This amounts to 5 edits per manageable article per month, which is just about the historical average for the encyclopedia. These averages mask some heroic efforts; it is unjust to characterize 100 edits per month as only bureaucratic. Witness, for example User:Anthere, at one time the Chair of Wikimedia foundation, who once stayed up 24 hours straight to work on the French edition of the encyclopedia (this was before we knew her as Florence Nibart-Devouard).

What does this model have to do with reality? I would suggest that, in order for an article to survive, it has to be of reasonable quality, so that the deletionist forces in the Wikipedia project can find no reason to delete it. Before the deletionist faction gained the upper hand, the constructivist faction was able to increase the number of articles exponentially, each positive edit feeding the mutual interest of others, leading to more mutual edits. This has not been true since 2007. Andrew Lih, User:Fuzheado has estimated that critical mass is about 20 editors per successful article (my personal experience is that this number can be as small as 5). It is currently more difficult to freely create more articles, possibly because so much time has to be spent maintaining the current number of articles. For this editor, at least, attempting to maintain the items on his watchlist consumes his wiki time.

Finally, to state the obvious, no one would add a item to one's watchlist if one did not care about it. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 15:45, 26 September 2009 (UTC)