Collaboration: a Confused Story in Five Graphs

My last two posts had graphs about Wikipedia. I tried to avoid drawing conclusions from the data for many reasons, but particularly because the data suffers from a bad streetlight effect. Here are a few other graphs that do not make the story any clearer. Wikipedia web readership Line chart of monthly pageview trajectories for eight major-language Wikipedias, all normalized so each language's January 2021 value = 100; every line ends below 100 From my previous post. US newspaper circulation Line chart titled "Total estimated circulation of U.S. daily newspapers," showing weekday and Sunday circulation from 1940 through the early 2020s; both lines rise gradually to peak around 1990 at roughly 60M, then fall sharply through 2020 Source: Pew Research Center, Newspapers fact sheet. GitHub commits, PRs, and new repos Three-panel chart titled "Record Acceleration" from GitHub: pull requests merged (90M), commits (1.4B), and new repos per month (20M), all from 2023 through 2026, each line accelerating sharply Source: The GitHub Blog. arXiv downloads Bar chart of arXiv monthly downloads from 1995 through 2025, growing slowly through the 2000s, accelerating from ~2010, and reaching peaks above 50 million per month in 2024 Source: arXiv monthly downloads. Reddit users Bar chart of Reddit's quarterly daily active users from Q1 2021 (~55M) through Q3 2025 (~116M), growing slowly through 2022 and accelerating sharply from 2023 onward Source: Backlinko, Reddit user and growth stats (compiled from Reddit's quarterly earnings). The newspaper graph should be horrifying; things that were once thought to be inevitable never are. I considered adding a "you are here" to the graph, to be honest. But also there's still very clearly human itches to learn, to engage, and to create. Where Wikipedia open knowledge fits into all of those... I don't know. But there are many stories we can tell and futures we can try to craft.