I've been looking over a lot of history articles and the tupical
pattern in terms of edits is a bell-shaped curve with the peak around 2007.
For a good example see
Shakespeare
http://toolserver.org/~tparis/articleinfo/index.php?article=William_Shakespeare&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia
look at the bar chart under "year counts..
By Nov 2007 the surge of editing virtually ended. The article was
then 83kb in length...it had a small burst of growth in late 2009
reaching 100k in June 2009; it is now 106k long. Basically the
article was mostly finished in 2007, and has had little change in the
last 3 years. With a couple minor exceptions the youngest source
cited in the footnotes is 2006. The newest item in the bibliography
is one book from 2007, I saw n=1 article in a scholarly journal
(from 1969). Maybe it's ok for a college freshman but an English
major so unaware of the recent scholarship would not get a good grade.
The look at the contributors
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=William_Shakespeare
of the 9 editors with over 100 edits, only two have been active on
this article in 2012
Shakespeare received 648,000 views in April 2012, compared to 585,000
in April 2010 and 575,000 in April 2008. As for the often heard
fear that anyone can edit it, note that 1100 editors are watching
over that article and are alerted to any changes. However none of
them has added anything from the ton of scholarship that has appeared
since 2006. ~~~~
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