Year in Review

We're getting to the bitter end of the 2008 calendar year, so now seems as good a time as any to recap the year and try to put it into perspective. Here's a brief overview of what 2008 brought to English Wikibooks:

• Added only 3 new administrators, but removed a whopping 13 of them for a net total of -10 administrators. With all the new anti-vandalism measures in place, there just doesn't seem to be a huge demand for new admins, and we've seen very few requests or nominations for the position in the last year. Many of the requests we do see are for rollbacker access instead of admin access for fighting vandalism anyway. Page deletion is really just no big deal.
  
• Added 1 new bureaucrat and 1 new checkuser. They were the same person, Mike.lifeguard. He's been a huge help at Wikibooks for a while now, and is a huge positive influence on the site.
• Added many editors, reviewers, patrollers and rollbackers. I'm not counting them all, but there were several in each category.
• Added 8 new featured books. The first wave of books came in 2007 when we first created the program, and I expected we would have a much slower rate of approval as time went on.
• We've been getting around 350,000 - 450,000 page hits per day on average, according to http://wikistics.falsikon.de/.
• Our other stats appear to have stopped updating in May 2008, so I don't have any good numbers from there.

In some respects it was a relatively slow year for us, but in others it was quite exciting. We are seeing a little bit less community participation then in the past, but more people are concentrating on their books and building excellent content. There will be plenty of time in 2009 to talk about why things are trending in this way.