What particular factors might have begun to inhibit participation in 2006, when we know it began to stagnate?

Rageross has a really interesting theory, and it makes a lot of sense. If the same trend were true in the other Wikipedias, then we might be able to confirm that Wikipedia is experiencing a natural slow down in growth, rather than some failure of vision. said, my instinct tells me that "natural slow down" is only part of the explanation, and that there are lots of things we can still do to make the community more vibrant. But let's investigate, if we can.

Long mail ahead -- bear with me!

It seems to me that either A) article creation tends to peak at a certain number of articles, supporting the "low-hanging fruit" hypothesis. Or B) article creation tends to peak after a certain period of time has passed, or is associated with some other variable, and is unrelated to the number of articles. Which would debunk "low-hanging fruit."

So, from Erik Zachte's stats pages: New article creation in enWP peaked in July 2006, when enWP had 1.2 million articles. And, new article creation in svWP peaked in May 2006, at 162K articles.

That suggests that A, low-hanging-fruit, is false. If we looked at other language versions, and saw new article creation peaking at widely varying article counts, then A would be, in my view, thoroughly debunked.

Which leaves us looking for a different cause. I would say that then would leave us with three possibilities.

B1) If new article creation peaked across all language versions more-or-less simultaneously (meaning, on the same date), then I can only imagine that the cause is somehow both external to us, and global. Examples: a global blossoming of interactive sites lured away our editors, or, a terrible global economic collapse meant people everywhere needed to focus solely on paid work. (A non-external hypthesis: I also speculate sometimes: if Jimmy talked publicly, a lot, about quality post-Siegenthaler, then maybe that somehow engendered a large global increase in restrictiveness inside the editing communities. I can't think of any internal factor but Jimmy that would potentially have that kind of large global impact.)

B2) If new article creation peaked for each language version at roughly the same time post-launch (like, launch + five-and-a-half months), that would support the idea that our editing communities have a natural internal lifecycle. (That wouldn't mean the "natural" lifecycle was necessarily a positive one, but it would suggest that the cause of the peak is internal to each editing community.) I have sometimes wondered whether online communities have a certain period of time (possibly varying according to the nature of the community) during which they either thrive or fail: maybe that's true, and we have some of each type.

B3) If new article creation peaked for English on July 2006, and peaked for other language versions within a year afterwards, that would suggest to me that other-language-versions were possibly modelling their behaviours on the behaviours in English, regardless of their suitability. So for example, if "low-hanging fruit" were true for English, and English responded with a number of behaviours (such as more deletionism, more emphasis on "quality," higher barriers to new article creation, new focus on multimedia, etc.) -- then perhaps other language-versions started adopting those same behaviours, accidentally triggering a premature peak of new article creation. That hypothesis has always sounded true to me (anecdotally, people in other language versions have told me stories that tend to support it), but Swedish new article creation peaking before English suggests that is not true.

Does anyone have time to look at the stats pages and check a few other random languages for the date on which new article creation peaked, and the number of articles at that point? Because I am provisionally thinking, based on the Swedish example, that "low-hanging fruit" is not true.

Yeah, I've always thought that the low hanging fruit explanation is, at best, a partial explanation. There are definitely other factors at play, some external, some internal. ... and we can really only have an impact on the internal factors.

As far as I know, some Wikipedias are more liberal, some are more tight, and this has had very little impact on article or editor growth. The real issue is cultural and behavioral, and a culture acts without policy (sometimes in spite of policy).

I think there is much more support for the hypothesis that there is more friction in the community, due to its increasing size, and maybe due to the kinds of people it attracts, and the kinds of conflicts that have emerged due to Wikipedia's popularity. Check the rise in administrator incidents, and then use the same tool to look up Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts. People are just fighting a lot more, and I'm not so sure that we've been able to address the real root causes of those fights.

I'd like to take a closer look at Erik's stats. It's unfortunate that the best study I've been able to look at has come from an external source. I think there are some important trends worth looking at.

The data presented from the earlier fact base work indicates that there doesn't seem to be a relationship between new article growth and participation in En, FR, De wikipedia:

What this data says is that participation tends to plateau after a period of time, but that the most active contributors get even more active in expanding content. I will also look for a visualization that Eric did - think it shows a similar take-off.

The data on increased reverts from Ed Chi speaks to the original question that Netmouse posed. This data actually raises a question about whether there really was much of a shift in 2006? Looks to me like there has been a rather consistent increase in reverts over time. This may speak to continuous tightening of editorial standards/control across the project over time rather than a one time increase.

One other helpful source of article growth info is Eric Z's visualization visualization