Howie,
There are two things that I'm pretty sure the editor trends survey has missed.
Firstly it looks at reverted edits but not deleted ones. That's why Mr
Z man's survey is so important - it looks at the article creators
whose deleted articles don't count if you only look at live edits.
Secondly, and I'm not sure whether we want to make a big public thing
about this, much of wikimedia was contributed by people who were at
work. As companies got more slick about monitoring internet usage and
disciplining staff for misuse of the Internet then I'm fairly sure we
lost a lot of those editors, or only got their edits outside working
hours. I started editing in early 2007, just after the peak period,
and I knew not to edit at work because I'd been involved from a
Privacy angle in the implementation of monitoring software. I don't
know what the market penetration was during the middle of that decade
for such software, but I'm pretty sure it is now ubiquitous on
corporate setups.
We don't have either the IP address data to directly verify this nor
do I think e could or should ask our 2004/2006 editors if they were
editing on their employers time. Though we could indirectly test this
by taking editors who have declared their age and timezone and look at
how the profile of edits in the working day has changed over time.
I know we that in the UK mornings we usually have a build up of
backlogs as the Australians go to bed, the Americans haven't woken up
yet and most of the Brits are at work. I suspect that would have been
different five years ago.
If my theory on that is correct then one element of our dropoff in
editing may be a one off rather than an ongoing trend.
Though I think we ought to be discreet about this, we could have some
editors still in the same jobs as they had then who wouldn't want
their employers to realise that we still have records of the times
they edited Wikipedia several years ago.
WereSpielChequers
On 21 March 2011 21:36, Howie Fung <hfung(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yes, thanks for sending this along.
I created a fallout chart which helped me understand the relative weights of
different paths:
http://bit.ly/ggyypQ
I'm also trying to put this in the context of the Editor Trends Research [1]
and the Product Whitepaper [2]. These numbers seem to suggest that
registered users actually have a relatively small percentage chance of
getting their first edit reverted (3.2% = 1,223/38,404). This seems to be
pretty consistent with what we're seeing in other revert research (e.g.,
Zachte's revert trends [3] has registered editors being reverted 4.2% of the
time).
While reversion rates for registered editors appears to have grown quite a
bit from 2005-2007, the numbers are still relatively small, especially when
compared to the reversion rates of anonymous editors. This seems to suggest
that important areas for research are:
1) Understanding reversion of edits from anonymous users and their
downstream impact on our other metrics (e.g., New Wikipedians)
2) Obtaining a more nuanced understanding of reversions to registered
editors (e.g., in addition to understanding the % of edits that get reverted
over time, understanding the nature of the reversions and whether they have
gotten more contentious over time).
Howie
[1]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study/Results
[2]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
[3]
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper#Reversion_and_Newbie_…
On 3/21/11 1:24 PM, Zack Exley wrote:
Thanks for pointing this out. This is very cool stuff. Philippe & James
Alexander are working on some related questions. I just asked them to reach
out to you and Mr.Z-man.
Zack
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:27 PM, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've just come across a really important bit of research on EN wiki.
User:Mr.Z-man analyzed the new accounts created in February to see how
many were still editing in September.
Key findings:
Over two thirds of new accounts had still not become editors after 6
months.
Editors who start by creating articles are only about a quarter of new
editors, three quarters edit existing articles. I find this credible
if a little on the low side. But over ten thousand newbies created an
article in February 2010, had their article deleted and ceased
editing.
Editors whose articles are not deleted are over seven times more
likely to remain than editors whose articles were deleted.
As one would expect, the retention rate of Article creators was much
lower than of other new editors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mr.Z-man/newusers
WereSpielChequers
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