The decline happened as a result of my indefinite banishment from Wikipedia. How many page views did I generate when I was active on Wikipedia? A lot more than I generate now that I'm banned!

I'm kinda kidding around but there's more than a kernel of truth in there. When Wikipedia was first created... there were more than a gazillion bits of knowledge missing. Over time though... the "easiest" bits were filled in. As all the lowest hanging fruit was picked... there were less and less people tall enough to reach the higher fruit. Clearly this resulted in a significant decrease in editing activity and by extension... a decrease in page views.

What percentage of the total decline in page views does this explanation actually account for? Beats me. It has to account for some though.

On a tangentially related note... a few weeks after famous economists die... I like to try and grab a screenshot of the page views for their Wikipedia entries. Their page views have a huge spike as their life/death is widely discussed... but then the page views decline pretty quickly afterwards. Unfortunately, in too many cases I've forgotten to grab screenshots. And the graph doesn't look as good when you have to go back in time. :( Why economists? Well... I think they'd appreciate it more than most famous dead people. Plus, it could be interesting/informative to compare their graphs in order to try and discern some useful information about something... economical.

In exchange for my explanation... how about you try and resolve Satt's Paradox? Or, you can try and predict if/when/how quarters up are going to replace thumbs up.