zlacker

>>unquot+(OP)
People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those users that could not reasonably contribute, the percentage of contributors is much higher.

There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.

Here is the Danish site for one of the most beloved Danes: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup

Here is the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup

It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.

>>flexie+U2
Deletionism is the thing that will kill Wikipedia, by deleting itself and gradually narrowing the circle of permitted contributors.

There are some situations where the non-English Wikipedias have far more information than the English ones though, because of how "notability" works.

>>pjc50+g7
The number of Wikipedia articles is steadily increasing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Reas...

>>common+oa
There are a number of people in this thread explaining how the policy prevented them from participating, and usually caused them to quit participating entirely.

>>pjc50+4l
My comment was unclear. Yes, people who are solely interested in writing about one topic are prevented from participating if that topic doesn't meet the notability criteria.

When I said that it "doesn't prevent anyone from participating", I was only considering the editors who are interested in writing about a wider variety of topics.

For better or worse, Wikipedia frowns on editors who are only interested in editing articles on one topic. There's a page for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-purpose_accou...

This is because these editors usually have a conflict of interest, and must make an extra effort to keep their writing free of bias.

Policies aimed at improving the quality of articles also tend to reduce participation. It's a trade-off, and I don't know that the optimal balance would be.