A good, well-balanced (I almost said NPOV) post. But I’m afraid that something like “flagged revisions” - or whatever the latest buzzword may be - WILL happen, and relatively soon. The reason is simple: Jimbo wants it. He even put a notice on the project page endorsing the idea and slamming bloggers who dislike it.

I can understand why Jimbo wants to get respectable. He’s tired of people complaining about their WP bios to him. He’s fed up with the (usually bad) jokes about how unreliable Wikipedia is. In his position, I’d want something like flagged revisions, too.

But I’m not in his position. I don’t care about WP getting “respectable”. I want my Wikipedia unfiltered and raucous as ever. With my edit count, I’d probably get “surveyor” status or whatever they finally call it. (Or maybe not, if the exalted position is confined to admins.)

Except I don’t want the status, and I wouldn’t do anything to flag any article as meeting my (snicker) “standards”. To paraphrase Groucho, I don’t want to belong to a club that would accept my editorial judgment.

Another blogger said he’d “prefer complete liberty or rigorous peer review, not this watery combo.” Put me down for complete liberty, or at least unflagged liberty. I wish the proposal would just go away. But Jimbo will make it happen.

I think you’ve unpacked a lot of important issues here. The “people-centered” and “intimate and personal” are probably the most important. I have some ideas about this that I’ll blog up when I get the chance.

As for a “final” article count, I think that what we will see is a fairly significant residual slope (a few hundred articles per day) that represents a) long-time Wikipedians who are still trying explicitly to search for uncovered topics and research them, and b) the largely untapped vein of topics that only experts in specific fields know about (history fields, in particular).

The damping of the growth curve so far has been the result of saturation of the pool of potential editors, in addition to the increasing scarcity of “low-hanging fruit”. Most potential contributors to the English Wikipedia (English-speaking internet users) already know about it, and most that haven’t become editors by now never will.

But I think (hope) that the situation is different if you consider only knowledge workers (professors, teachers, researchers, etc.). While the typical non-editor likes Wikipedia, she/he isn’t interested in writing and researching an encyclopedic topic. Knowledge workers, on the other hand, are still ambivalent about Wikipedia and are gradually being convinced of its value as coverage of their specialty improves. And they like writing and researching, they just think a) they have original research to do and can’t be bothered, and/or b) writing for Wikipedia is not recognized by their profession (and won’t help them get tenure).

My hope is that as more knowledge workers become editors, it will catalyze even more to start editing. The growth curve would look quite different if, e.g., writing and improving Wikipedia articles was considered professional ’service’ (in the same sense as editing and peer-reviewing for journals, or writing newspaper columns related to one’s field), something one would put on their C.V. But I think that’s probably overly-optimistic.