Hi Pine,

 

> I think that the definition on Special:Statistics makes more sense for "active editors" than the >=5 definition than is commonly used in discussions on mailing lists.

 

tl;dr 'active editor'  is a term with a long history. If we recoin that term and keep informing the public how many active editors we counted we will make our public stats more vain and empty.

 

Long version:

 

This is a recurring discussion, with minor variations.

 

In my personal opinion our movement has a tendency to publish too extreme numbers already, however bloated, as if our more substantial achievements aren't awe-inspiring enough.

(examples are 'Wikipedias in 280 languages', '800 wikis', not to mention our extreme 'article' counts)

As long as we keep these extreme counts with little substance for ourselves I wouldn't care much about terminology, but we tend not to keep these for ourselves.

 

Can I illustrate my point by reductio ad absurdum (sort of)?

Would you call a person who jots his name on a paycheck once a month and writes nothing else a writer?

Would you call a person who climbs three steps to enter a bus a climber?

Are you a reader if you glance at a glossy's cover once at your local barber?

 

A person with one edit in one particular month and maybe none in the rest of the year to me is not much of an editor really.

It's one more person who knows of Wikipedia (we have 500+ million of those) and found the edit and submit buttons and tried those, to see what happens.

Now if that person likes what happened and wants to do it again we are on to something.

The threshold of edits a person should reach before we can infer intention and motivation is of course arbitrary, but clearly more than one in my view.

 

I'm not saying we shouldn’t count one-off's. If people get deterred by one problematic edit that is hugely relevant. And the enormous gap between 1+ and 3+ edits is of course a major concern.

I would just prefer a different term rather than 'active editor', which is what you suggest to adopt.

 

Cheers,

 

Erik   

 

From: analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Pine W
Sent: Saturday, September 12, 2015 23:29
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics.
Subject: Re: [Analytics] User statistics for video marking ENWP 5m article milestone

 

Aha, I just figured it out. The two pages are using very different definitions for "active editors". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics refers to anyone who has made a *single* edit in the last 30 days as an "active editor", while https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm refers to edits that have made *5 or more* edits in the past month as active. This mix of terminology is confusing. I think that the definition on Special:Statistics makes more sense for "active editors" than the >=5 definition than is commonly used in discussions on mailing lists. Can anyone suggest a better set of terminology to distinguish the >=1 "active editors" from the >=5 "active editors"?

Pine

 

 

On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Next question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics shows that ENWP alone has had 123,512 active editors (5 or more actions) in the last 30 days. But https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ shows that for June 2015 (the latest data available there), there were only 31k active editors on ENWP and 77k active editors for all projects combined. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm seems consistent with the latter, showing that for August 2015 there were 30,789 active editors. Is there an explanation for the large difference between the 123,512 active editors shown on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics, and the 30,789 active editors shown on https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm?

 

Thanks,

Pine

 

 

On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks!
Pine

On Sep 11, 2015 11:20 AM, "James Forrester" <jforrester@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On 11 September 2015 at 11:13, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Analytics,

On ENWP, does the number of 26,163,773 users

​You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics "Registered users"? Assuming yes…​

include IPs who have made edits?

​No.

Does it include editors on all Wikimedia projects

​No.​

 

or just those who have registered and/or edited on ENWP?

​Registered, regardless of having edited.

 

J.

--

James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester

 

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