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taygetea comments on The great decline in Wikipedia pageviews (condensed version) - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: VipulNaik 27 March 2015 02:02PM

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Comment author: taygetea 29 March 2015 01:50:14AM 2 points [-]

This would rely on a large fraction of pageviews being from Wikipedia editors. That seems unlikely. Got any data for that?

Comment author: Xerographica 29 March 2015 03:07:33AM 1 point [-]

No data, like I said...

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

I did find this...

The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000 and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer only 31,000 people could be considered active editors. - The Decline of Wikipedia

That confirms a decline in editors... and by extension... a decline in edits/pageviews... but no idea what fraction of the total pageviews decline it represents. It's probably pretty small.

The Google explanation probably represents a much higher fraction. For a while Wikipedia seemed to frequently be at the top of numerous search results. This would of course equate to considerable pageviews. Now it seems like Wikipedia results aren't as frequently as high as they used to be.

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