Enhanced notifications may be useful for recruiting or retaining power users, which I am attempting to measure under what Analytics calls very active editors. Have there been any studies done about the effect of enhanced notification on the statistics for very active editors?
Power users are useful to projects in ways that occasional active editors are not. The decrease of approximately 7% of very active users on English Wikipedia from June 2010 to June 2013 may be more significant than the loss of approximately 12% of active users during that time. There was a 21% decline in total edits to English Wikipedia during that time. That last number worries me the most, and I'm guessing that the loss of the 7% of the very active contributor population has disproportionately contributed to the decline of total edit counts.
Has there been any research done on what it takes to convert active editors into very active editors?
Is WMF's focus on the total population of active editors the best focus, or should it focus on very active editors, edit count, or bytes changed? From what I've seen I think there should be more investment in addressing the latter three while continuing the investment in addressing the active editor statistics. I suspect that the VE will do little to change the very active editor statistics so other measures will be necessary, such as initiatives with a social focus.
I also think social media sites and computer games of all kinds should be seen as Wikimedia competitors and there should be initiatives directly aimed at recruiting and retaining people who would otherwise be playing games or spending time on social media sites for minutes or hours.
Pine