I do not take declining activity on Wikipedia as a bad sign but as an indicator of a natural collaborative process. After reading Wikinomics, I just finished reading Everything is Miscellaneous.

First of all, Wikipedia did not create knowledge, it captured our shared perspective of knowledge in a way not replicable by the paper and vetting process of a traditional encyclopedia. Through the social knowing of crowds, our shared knowledge is now captured in a convenient and easily updatable place.

With the hurdle of that early bulk of capturing complete, the trajectory for Wikipedia may change but still be no less important.

Dan,

The idea of sending a vetted and edited version of Wikipedia to every classroom in North America is an interesting concept. I think we should expand on that idea a little. The problem that I think I have is that people normally take a lot of the content as gossip. I think if you do send edited copies out into the world, it should be with a challenge it find flaws, fill gaps and research these articles to make sure they are accurate. I think this would serve 2 purposes. 1. The skills to research topics would increase because they would question everything. 2. We would continue to see debates and improvements in the content.

The bigger question to that idea is what would be the incentive to question everything or dig a little deeper. The smart kids always want to prove they are smart. How do you engage everyone or the larger number of people?

I wonder if this is not a normal evolution curve, akin to a Garter Hype Cycle. Are we not looking at the beginning of the “trough of disllusionment” to be followed by the plateau of enlightenment. For me it would feel like the hype is falling away due to media chatter about quality and as Dan is suggesting some variations on the theme will ensure a smaller but more focused group will continue to expand the knowledge base. It must be getting hard to deliver expert knowledge to wikipedia as there are fewer “easy wins” to find on it and it requires a deep level of specialist knowledge to make the contributions and editions (not with standing the people wish to change things for changes sake)

[...] issue may very well relate to Dan’s question from a couple of weeks before that on whether Wikipedia has peaked, which itself may have partially been a response to Anthony’s question from a few months [...]