@groceryheist @mako you're the only ones I can ask. Here's a plot of Chinese Wikipedia daily editors. The story here, of a community that overcame exponential growth and found stable linear growth, is mirrored in the daily edits curve (and to a lesser extent, the new articles curve; not so much the bytes added, that's been flat for many years).
My question: is this story real? Are they actually mentoring editors, growing quality, and expanding? Or is this just PRC vs ROC turf wars, or spam?
@22 Thanks for your great questions!
I haven't looked closely at Chinese Wikipedia so I can't speak to it directly. It's very interesting that they have stable linear growth. And I would like to know more.
One important fact that doesn't get emphasized in the paper is that there is a /lot/ of variation between wikis. The average trend is consistent with RAD dynamics, but I wouldn't claim it is universal.
@mako anythinng you want to add?
@groceryheist @mako I'm burning all my mana on my Chinese-speaking friends to get me some insights, since I'm still at least five years away from answering them myself 😅, hopefully y’all will have more luck.
I dig what you say about variability on Wikia. My hypothesis, having looked at just a few nation-grade Wikipedias, that stable linear growth is what I expect to see (new articles created, old articles freshened), and that other, smaller, Wikipedias may have that, rather than RAD. Will look.
@groceryheist Sorry, I don't follow (insomnia)—how do you mean 'less likely to generalize'?
(I'll say this here because I've been thinking about it and have nowhere else to say it—I learned how to ask questions and answer them on StackOverflow by people (not so) gently telling me when I was doing it wrong, and that (rough) mentorship is something I wish Wikipedia had more of. (I kind of alluded to this in my initial question—are Chinese editors mentoring newcomers, thus keeping them?))
Oh! I'm so sorry for not being clear. I meant to say that we chose to analyze Wikia rather than Wikipedia editions because, from the perspective of replicating results from EN:WP, we wanted to see if they would hold up on communities that /were not/ Wikipedia. Like maybe there is something weird about Wikipedia that leads to rise-and-decline dynamics, but that would not happen on Wikia. Does that make sense?
@groceryheist @mako @22 i'd be kind of curious what results would be like (if the data even existed at this point) for the early days of the wiki form - c2, usemod, meatballwiki - or adjacent ideas like everything2.
@groceryheist some of that era's projects still online, at least in archival form. c2 (ward's wiki), for example:
and usemod / meatball:
i'm not sure how accessible the history is at this point.
@brennen @22 @mako
That's a really interesting question! I don't know the answer. Do you know how to find archives of these projects?