Re: [Analytics] [Spam] Re: User statistics for video marking ENWP 5m article milestone

I do agree that we reject good contributions. I also agree this is a messy filter. The main point however is do we want to communicate to the general public using such messy, fuzzy, inflated (partially), hard to not misunderstand numbers? We have a history of using vanity metrics (800+ wikis, 280+ Wikipedias). Not untrue in some very formal sense, but totally misleading in that they play on expectations which are totally false. Erik *From:* Analytics [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Aaron Halfaker *Sent:* Tuesday, October 27, 2015 16:41 *To:* A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. *Subject:* Re: [Analytics] [Spam] Re: User statistics for video marking ENWP 5m article milestone I don't agree. There are a lot of good-faith page creations that get deleted every day. There are also many edits that get reverted. Arguably, those edits aren't productive either, but they don't disappear from the dumps like article drafts do. This is a messy filter at best. On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Erik Zachte &lt;ezachte(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: As Aaron says. I'd like to add that if almost 3 million accounts disappeared from the dumps alltogether (vandals? school kids?) that makes the case for not using such a count even more convincing. Erik *From:* Analytics [mailto:analytics-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Aaron Halfaker *Sent:* Tuesday, October 27, 2015 15:48 *To:* A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. *Subject:* Re: [Analytics] [Spam] Re: User statistics for video marking ENWP 5m article milestone user_editcount includes edits to deleted pages and revdeleted edits. Erik's perl scripts use the XML dumps that do not include edits to deleted pages. Strictly speaking, user_editcount is a better proxy for the number of people who have "ever edited". Erik's is the number of people whose edits appear in the history of a page at the time of an XML dump. -Aaron On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Jonathan Morgan &lt;jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: 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 &lt;andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk&gt; 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 &lt;ezachte(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: once till Oct 1, 2015, and 2,181,006 three or more times. about two years (Wikimania London). reservations on this particular metric, for newcomers. 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. excluding IPs, that have ever edited English Wikipedia, ? 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. rather empty metric for several reasons: created a new user id? Only veteran editors know about sockpuppeting and how one is supposed not to do that. 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. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution 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. Behalf Of Andrew Gray an interest in Wikipedia and analytics. article milestone accounts which have at least one edit on English Wikipedia - at least assuming my SQL query is correct! http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/1911 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. "autocreated" -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics