Thanks for the link. The figure 4,058,477 you cite (from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution), as you note, comes with the warning that "Only article edits are counted, not edits on discussion pages, etc". I assume this is why the magic word NUMBEROFUSERSat en Wikipedia returns 16,763,691 (numerous low activity editors apparently make their few edits outside article mainspace). The breakdown I could live with, for a while, but the fact that this stat covers only about a quarter of registered accounts is a problem. Is anybody familiar with a way to achieve a breakdown of all named accounts with 1+ edit (for English Wikipedia), no matter which namespace they edited? Preferably with more flexible ranges than the ones in that table? In other words, the linked page provides "Distribution of article [namespace] edits over registered editors", whereas I am interested in "Distribution of [all] namespaces edits over registered editors". -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/10/2012 4:49 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

Hi Piotr, You might make the assumption that the difference between 4 million and 16 million is largely editors who never get out of userspace, my experience is that such users are relatively rare, or at least won't dominate that 12 million. I'm fairly sure that there will be a number of different groups in that 12 million. Steve Walling, Aaron or Maryana may be able to help analyse or at least explain them. Significant groups in the 12 million will definitely include: 1 People who registered an account and tried but never successfully saved an edit because when they looked they saw a wall of code and they don't do html. The WMF is investing a lot of money in WYSIWYG editing software in the hope that this will enable goodfaith but not very technical people to edit Wikipedia. 2 Vandals since 2007. We have edit filters that are trying to dissuade vandals from saving their first edit because it triggers one of our tests for probably being vandalism. These filters only came in during the last few years and have been improved over time - so they are deterring a significant proportion of recent badfaith editors from ever saving an edit. 3 Visitors from other wikis. One of the features of Single User Login is that if you are logged in and you click on a link that takes you to another wikimedia wiki, your account becomes active at that wiki even if you never go near the edit button. My account is active on 92 wikis and I've edited in rather less than half of them. I won't go into all the reasons why one might visit other wikis, but if you see that an article you've written has equivalents in several other languages I consider it human nature to click on the links and look at the article. Even if you don't use Google translate, the choice of image and the size of the paragraphs is often enough to tell you whether someone has translated your work or started afresh. 4 Editors whose articles have been deleted. About a quarter of new editors start by creating a new article rather than by editing existing articles. A large majority of such articles get deleted and their authors depart. If the 4 million is only measured on surviving edits to article space then there will be many hundreds of thousands whose only article space edits have been deleted. 5 Zombie accounts. We now have programs that prevent people opening accounts that are overly similar to the names of existing editors, but before these filters came in many editors would protect themselves from such impersonation by creating such "zombie accounts" themselves and marking their userpage with a link to their main account. 6 Edit conflicts. Breaking news stories attract editors like moths to flames, our article on Sarah Palin peaked at 25 edits per minute at one point during the day she became John McCain's running mate (I don't think anyone logs the number of edit conflicts). If you are a newbie trying to edit a trending article by using that edit button on the top of the page then you are guaranteed to get frustrated and leave. The regulars have learned that busy pages are best edited one section at a time, and on a very busy page there simply isn't time to edit the whole page before a section edit is saved. Of course that could be easily resolved by disabling whole page editing on busy pages, but I'm not expecting that anytime soon. Another issue is that I believe that the 4 million are people who have one undeleted edit to mainspace on the English Wikipedia since December 2004. If so the 16 million may include those who haven't edited since December 2004. I'm probably missing a few other variables, I'm afraid this is a complex area, but I hope this gives you an idea of the problem. WSC On 10 May 2012 16:35, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:

Dario, Thanks, but the last time I looked into this, running queries required knowing how to code going way beyond a simple knowledge of wiki syntax or excel functions. I think it was at WikiSym few years back where we raised that issue - that much of the data Wikimedia provides is limited to the small subset of scholars who can code with pretty names like Java or Pearl and such. I am pretty sure this is the reason for why social sciences have been lagging in Wikipedia research since day one... Now, if I am wrong about any of the above, do let me know. But the last time I looked at https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Database_access#Command-line_access it didn't look too user friendly (for a non-coder). Is there any place where a non-coder can ask a Toolserv coder to run some of those queries? I'd be happy to trade some of my Wiki skills (as in, writing a DYK, or reviewing a GA) for such assistance :) -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/10/2012 2:29 PM, Dario Taraborelli wrote:

Piotr, have you seen this: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Query_service ? On May 17, 2012, at 1:50 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

What about users who register without any intention to edit? I expect many people register out of habit, because they expect unspecified benefits. On most sites there are some. And there even are some on our site for read-only users, namely to be able to tweak the user settings (e.g. how links are displayed). Erik Zachte From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 7:58 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Are there any stats on activity of editors compared to the population? Hi Piotr, You might make the assumption that the difference between 4 million and 16 million is largely editors who never get out of userspace, my experience is that such users are relatively rare, or at least won't dominate that 12 million. I'm fairly sure that there will be a number of different groups in that 12 million. Steve Walling, Aaron or Maryana may be able to help analyse or at least explain them. Significant groups in the 12 million will definitely include: 1 People who registered an account and tried but never successfully saved an edit because when they looked they saw a wall of code and they don't do html. The WMF is investing a lot of money in WYSIWYG editing software in the hope that this will enable goodfaith but not very technical people to edit Wikipedia. 2 Vandals since 2007. We have edit filters that are trying to dissuade vandals from saving their first edit because it triggers one of our tests for probably being vandalism. These filters only came in during the last few years and have been improved over time - so they are deterring a significant proportion of recent badfaith editors from ever saving an edit. 3 Visitors from other wikis. One of the features of Single User Login is that if you are logged in and you click on a link that takes you to another wikimedia wiki, your account becomes active at that wiki even if you never go near the edit button. My account is active on 92 wikis and I've edited in rather less than half of them. I won't go into all the reasons why one might visit other wikis, but if you see that an article you've written has equivalents in several other languages I consider it human nature to click on the links and look at the article. Even if you don't use Google translate, the choice of image and the size of the paragraphs is often enough to tell you whether someone has translated your work or started afresh. 4 Editors whose articles have been deleted. About a quarter of new editors start by creating a new article rather than by editing existing articles. A large majority of such articles get deleted and their authors depart. If the 4 million is only measured on surviving edits to article space then there will be many hundreds of thousands whose only article space edits have been deleted. 5 Zombie accounts. We now have programs that prevent people opening accounts that are overly similar to the names of existing editors, but before these filters came in many editors would protect themselves from such impersonation by creating such "zombie accounts" themselves and marking their userpage with a link to their main account. 6 Edit conflicts. Breaking news stories attract editors like moths to flames, our article on Sarah Palin peaked at 25 edits per minute at one point during the day she became John McCain's running mate (I don't think anyone logs the number of edit conflicts). If you are a newbie trying to edit a trending article by using that edit button on the top of the page then you are guaranteed to get frustrated and leave. The regulars have learned that busy pages are best edited one section at a time, and on a very busy page there simply isn't time to edit the whole page before a section edit is saved. Of course that could be easily resolved by disabling whole page editing on busy pages, but I'm not expecting that anytime soon. Another issue is that I believe that the 4 million are people who have one undeleted edit to mainspace on the English Wikipedia since December 2004. If so the 16 million may include those who haven't edited since December 2004. I'm probably missing a few other variables, I'm afraid this is a complex area, but I hope this gives you an idea of the problem. WSC On 10 May 2012 16:35, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote: Thanks for the link. The figure 4,058,477 you cite (from http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution), as you note, comes with the warning that "Only article edits are counted, not edits on discussion pages, etc". I assume this is why the magic word NUMBEROFUSERS at en Wikipedia returns 16,763,691 (numerous low activity editors apparently make their few edits outside article mainspace). The breakdown I could live with, for a while, but the fact that this stat covers only about a quarter of registered accounts is a problem. Is anybody familiar with a way to achieve a breakdown of all named accounts with 1+ edit (for English Wikipedia), no matter which namespace they edited? Preferably with more flexible ranges than the ones in that table? In other words, the linked page provides "Distribution of article [namespace] edits over registered editors", whereas I am interested in "Distribution of [all] namespaces edits over registered editors". -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski On 5/10/2012 4:49 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote: I'm not sure that we have exactly what your asking for. For example we have the figure of 4,058,477 but that is for registered accounts on the English Wikipedia that have made at least one edit to an article. Different language versions of Wikipedia are also available, but of course registered accounts doesn't exactly tally with Wikipedians not least because IP editors are excluded. Also I believe that early edits - pre 2004 may not be available and I suspect that deleted edits may not be counted. That said we have further stats of 1,614,938 registered accounts with >= 3 article edits and 772,557 >=10 So http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution is well worth looking at, but they break at 32 and 100 not 50 which may be a problem for you. Hope that helps WSC On 9 May 2012 23:42, Piotr Konieczny <pik1(a)pitt.edu> wrote: I was looking at official stats, but I seem to be unable to find out an answer to the following question: * how many of Wikipedia editors have X edits (or fall within a range of edits) To be more precise, I am curious how many Wikipedians have: * exactly 1 edit * between 2-9 edits * between 10-50 edits I know that the total number of registered accounts is reported at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians Can anybody direct me to the right page/counter that would allow me to obtain the above information? I hope it is obtainable without having to download the dump... Incidentally, if anybody has those numbers, in addition to replying here feel free to add the information and/or source the one present at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians Thanks, -- Piotr Konieczny PhD Candidate Dept of Sociology Uni of Pittsburgh http://pittsburgh.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l