Lifecycles of Peer-produced Knowledge Commons

Abstract: After increasing rapidly over seven years, the number of active contributors to English Wikipedia peaked in 2007 and has been in decline since. Benjamin Mako Hill will present a body of evidence that suggests that English Wikipedia's pattern of growth and decline appears to be a general feature of "peer production"—the model of collaborative production that has produced millions of wikis, free/open source software projects, websites like OpenStreetMap, and more. He will argue that this pattern of growth, maturity, and decline is not caused by newcomers who have stopped showing up, but rather because communities have become less open to the newcomers who do arrive. Read more >