I also wonder about this discrepancy. I ran a more explicit version of Andrew query, trying to eliminate some possible edge cases, and came up with the same number.
Now I'm curious. Are there junk rows in our user table, retained for legacy reasons maybe? Is user_editcount inaccurate? Erik, can you describe the processing you perform to winnow down from 8.2 million?
J
On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 7:06 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Interesting - wonder why my query's giving a higher number?
I agree entirely that we should be very careful with quoting these figures. I think you'd probably be safe to say that more than a million people have edited... but even then I'd be cautious.
Andrew.
On 27 October 2015 at 11:11, Erik Zachte ezachte@wikimedia.org wrote:
Wikistats has it that 5,644,681 registered accounts published at least
once till Oct 1, 2015, and 2,181,006 three or more times.
It used to publish that on [1][2] but I just removed it.
I'm campaigning against us publishing overly inflated counts since about
two years (Wikimania London).
Since this thread is going on and on, I'll repost my (reworded)
reservations on this particular metric, for newcomers.
Even if we state explicitly that this is not unique people, any audience
will think it may be close and we are overly correct by adding the caveat. It may not be so close. For that reason imo such a metric would be of questionable value, to put it mildly.
Pine:
Is there a way to get counts for the number of accounts, including or
excluding IPs, that have ever edited English Wikipedia, ?
First the anon contributors: when we'd count every ip address that shows
up in the dumps, we'd count *very* many people who were just vandalizing willfully, or just pressing edit for fun, or forgot to login once, and also moved from one ip address to another over the years. On top of that many people get a new ip address (from a pool) on every session, depends on provider policy.
As for registered editors the number Wikistats used to publish may be a
rather empty metric for several reasons:
- How many casual editors will have forgotten their password and just
created a new user id? Only veteran editors know about sockpuppeting and how one is supposed not to do that.
- How many people will have registered in good faith just out of habit,
or to tweak presentation preferences, and then played with the edit button just to see what happens? Note that roughly 2 out of 3 accounts doesn't even reach 3 edits.
Cheers, Erik Zachte
[1]
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution
[2] BTW I use the term wikipedians overly inclusive in that report. A
person who edited once or twice isn't a wikipedian in my book, just like a person who writes two post-it notes per month and nothing else isn't called a writer. Some terms only apply above some threshold.
-----Original Message----- From: Analytics [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 11:06 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
To a very crude approximation, there are approximately 8.2 million
accounts which have at least one edit on English Wikipedia - at least assuming my SQL query is correct! http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/1911
This is all user accounts with one or more edits in the contributions
record; it does not contain IPs, and it does not contain any accounts whose sole contributions have since been deleted (which is probably quite a substantial number). Conversely, it includes a vast panoply of single-use vandalism accounts, sockpuppets, etc etc etc. And bots, of course.
Andrew.
On 27 October 2015 at 05:50, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a way to get counts for the number of accounts, including or excluding IPs, that have ever edited English Wikipedia, ? It would be preferable to know the number of unique people, but of course that's impossible.
Thanks, Pine
Aha, that is important for me to know. Thanks Andrew.
Pine
On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 11 September 2015 at 19:19, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
James is of course correct, but one small caveat worth adding: because of SUL, a substantial proportion of these will be "autocreated" accounts from other projects - so even 'registration' may not mean what it seems.
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