This study assesses the generalizability of Halfaker et
al.’s influential 2013 paper on “The Rise and Decline of an
Open Collaboration System.” We replicate its tests of several
theories related to newcomer retention and norm entrenchment
using a dataset of hundreds of active peer production wikis
from Wikia. pdf 
Mean of the number of editors with at least 5 edits per month in standard deviation units for wikis in our sample.
Our study supports Rise and Decline's claim that quality control practices help explain increases in entrenchment and decreases in growth among peer production communities.
In one unsurprising exception, we find that norm pages do not appear to become more difficult to edit over time in wikis that make very little use of the project namespace. These preliminary findings suggest analysis of the relationship between the size of a community and governance systems as a direction for future work.