Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary Approaches to Attracting More and Better Content

Wikipedia is still increasing in size and quality. That is, the deletionists have still not managed to outpace the contributors. In what sense is Wikipedia in decline? The rate of Wikipedia's growth has declined but that is not the same. The rate of growth of the US economy has also declined from the boom years of the 1950s but real wealth is higher in the US today, and there are still plenty of opportunities to innovate and get rich.

I agree that social networking is sucking up a lot of oxygen. How much of that comes at Wikipedia's expense, I cannot guess. Over on Facebook there are community pages which look like an attempt to piggyback off of Wikipedia's content. In principle this could give untold numbers of Facebook users an incentive to write articles on Wikipedia - if only we would relax our silly notability restrictions to allow more local and specialized content. Facebook is fun in part because it doesn't delete anything, it ignores copyright restrictions, and it celebrates the long tail. On Facebook, people can gather around any topic of common interest, without fear that anyone who isn't interested in that topic can deem it unworthy and delete it. On Facebook you can share any information you like without regard to copyright or licensing or any of that rigmarole. Although how long the lawyers will let that continue I don't know.