# of daily editors seen on English #Wikipedia, January 2001 to December 2017—anonymous users, logged in users, then two kinds of bots.
So, lazyfediverse:
What happened 2006/2007? Was the financial collapse presaged by collapsing Wiki edit activity? Did Peak Oil trigger Peak Wiki?
(I've spent a month getting a metric ton [~1 GB JSON, converting into ~2 GB NetCDFs] of historic data from Wikimedia REST API and this is the first visualization I made. Won't be the last. https://github.com/fasiha/wikiatrisk)
@22 I expect that what happens is the community achieved saturation.
Consider the absolute numbers in relation to the number of that-language-speakers who are active online overall, perhaps.
Alternative hypothesis: 2007 is when the iPhone came out and people stopped interacting with the Internet instead of just consuming it.
I'm just spitballing ideas here.
@icefox a friend who saw it happen told me that was when the war between the inclusionists and the deletionists ended and the latter won: only notable articles allowed, get your filthy articles about Pokémon and such to Wikia:l.
https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism was recommended to understand what happened. Gwern there talks about how the Wikipedia people saw what happened and sought to staunch the loss but failed. There was a slight uptick starting in mid-2014 that you can just tell in that plot but… 🤕.
@XavierJulep @icefox trolllol
@icefox personally I found Gwern’s explanations of stagnant editor and content growth convincing. Sad but convincing. But no doubt there are others with different explanations l.