User:Econterms/Wikipedia is not doomed

A recurring theme in commentary about Wikipedia is that there are a declining number of editors in the western languages, so the system may be in some way doomed. Virginia Postrel's Nov 14 essay, presumptively titled "Who Killed Wikipedia?" explores that angle. Certainly many editors quit, which is reasonable enough, especially after they have unpleasant online conflicts.

But, Postrel and others pushing this theme usually leave out these forces going the other direction:

• The existing editors have better tools over time, so they are more efficient/productive, (Visual editor, bots, gadgets, Huggle etc, vandalism research, computer translation, mass photo uploads, more online content to summarize and index)
• They do not have to invest all that much to maintain the content ("intellectual capital") that's been written.
• A growing number of editors are getting some kind of professional credit or payoff for doing the work. (Heilman, Forsyth, PR people ; need other examples)

So, many editors are off on new adventures, experimenting, and adding new value sometimes. One is Wikidata which could raise the efficiency of the whole system, after some years of implementation. The overall system is growing, improving, and (I'm certain) not doomed.

In her essay, Postrel explains a lot about how Wikipedia works in a clear and mostly accurate way, so you get a sense of why it's not doomed, but she inserts the idea of doom here. This may be a useful trick to make the work seem provocative and publishable to editors -- it's click-bait. Essayists can use such tricks, more than scientists can. Another reason this idea reappears again and again seems to be that some of these authors have a deep belief that human behavior can be understood and explained by formal incentives or hierarchies, not expressiveness or altruism. They can't quite believe the system exists -- it's an endless puzzle and a marvel -- and it would be a relief to them if it collapsed.