User generated (web) content: trash or treasure

It has been claimed that the advent of user-generated content has
reshaped the way people approached all sorts of content realization
projects, being multimedia (YouTube, DeviantArt, etc.), knowl-
edge (Wikipedia, blogs), to software in general, when based on a
more general Open Source model.
After many years of research and evidence, several studies have
demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often con-
tain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve,
often developed by relatively small communities, and that still strug-
gle to attract a sustained number of contributors. In terms of such
content, the “tragedy” appears to be that the user demand for con-
tent and the offer of experts contributing content are on curves with
different slopes, with the demand growing more quickly.
In this paper we argue that, even given the differences in the re-
quested expertise, many projects reliant on user-contributed content
and expertise undergo a similar evolution, along a logistic growth:
a first slow growth rate is followed by a much faster evolution
growth. When a project fails to attract more developers i.e. contrib-
utors, the evolution of project’s content does not present the “explo-
sive growth” phase, and it will eventually “burnout”, and the project
appears to be abandoned. Far from being a negative finding, even
abandoned project’s content provides a valuable resource that could
be reused in the future within other projects.