---
title: "Collaboration: a Confused Story in Five Graphs"
date: 2026-04-29
description: "Some graphs about reading and writing on the internet. Less a story than a Rorschach test."
tags: [open-source, wikipedia, llm, collaboration]
---

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](/images/wikipedia-vital-articles-01-cross-lang-trajectories.png)

*From my [previous post](/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/).*

## 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](/images/pew-newspaper-chart.png)

*Source: [Pew Research Center, Newspapers fact sheet](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/).*

## 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](/images/web-collab-github-commits.png)

*Source: [The GitHub Blog](https://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](/images/arxiv-downloads-chart.png)

*Source: [arXiv monthly downloads](https://arxiv.org/stats/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](/images/web-collab-reddit-dau.png)

*Source: [Backlinko, Reddit user and growth stats](https://backlinko.com/reddit-users) (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.