Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating current trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it may have come against its limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. As growth has declined, there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these new developments in Wikipedia including decreased opportunities for sharing existing knowledge and increased bureaucratic stress on the socio-technical system itself.

This research investigated preservation practices of personal digital information by public library users. This qualitative study used semistructured interviews and two visual representation techniques, information source horizons and matrices, for data collection. The constant comparison method and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. A model emerged which describes the effects of social, cognitive, and affective influences on personal preservation decisions as well as the effects of fading cognitive associations and technological advances, combined with information escalation over time. Because the preservation of personal digital information involves personal, social, and technological interactions, the integration of these factors is necessary for a viable solution to the digital preservation problem.

The airwaves, telephone circuits, and computer cables are buzzing. Digital information surrounds us. We see digital bits on our new HDTVs, listen to them over the Internet, and create new ones ourselves every time we take a picture with our digital cameras. Then we email them to friends and family and create more digital bits. There's no secret here. YouTube, a company that didn’t exist just a few years ago, hosts 100 million video streams a day. i Experts say more than a billion songs a day are shared over the Internet in MP3 format. ii Digital bits. London's 200 traffic surveillance cameras send 64 trillion bits a day to the command data center. iii Chevron's CIO says his company accumulates data at the rate of 2 terabytes – 17,592,000,000,000 bits – a day. iv TV broadcasting is going all-digital by the end of the decade in most countries. More digital bits. What is a secret – one staring us in the face – is how much all these bits add up to, how fast they are multiplying, and what their proliferation imply. This White Paper, sponsored by EMC, is IDC's forecast of the digital universe – all the 1s and 0s created, captured, and replicated – and the implications for those who take the photos, share the music, and generate the digital bits and those who organize, secure, and manage the access to and storage of the information. Some of the key findings: • In 2006, the amount of digital information created,

Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating contemporary trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it has come against limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. We also show that as growth has declined there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these changes including decreased opportunities for writing up existing knowledge and increased stress on the socio-technical system itself.

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