Via TechCrunch, I read about a fascinating piece of work by Robert Rohde that seems to suggest that Wikipedia's astonishing rate of growth over the last few years is slowing down a bit. Check out this page, complete with interesting info. graphics like the one below.

Reading through the comments about this both on the Wikipedia talk pages and WikiEN-l archive is pretty revealing. Many people are extremely passionate about Wikipedia and unwilling to accept the validity of any argument that is seen to besmirch its good name. That leads to a lot of silly counter-arguments based on rhetoric and ideology rather than data.

The interesting thing is that I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that the slowdown, if it really does exist, is actually a bad thing for Wikipedia. It's very hard to interpret statistical analyses of logfiles. For instance, Rohde's analysis seems to show that overall edits are down slightly, and that a higher percentage of edits are reverts of earlier versions. Without knowing something more about the qualitative nature of these edits, it's hard to assume this is some kind of 'Mid-Life Crisis' slowdown as TechCrunch suggests. This could be a sign of maturity – more well-reasoned edits overall, perhaps. Or it could be a sign of change in the nature of contributions (and contributors). Wikipedia may be attracting a large proportion of users who make fewer, more substantive edits rather than many tiny corrections. We just don't know.

Fantastic food for thought, though.