Hi,
The program of WikiSym (2006 International Symposium on Wikis) at August
21th-23th in Odense, Denmark is published:
http://ws2006.wikisym.org/space/Symposium+Program
Not all abstracts are uploaded yet, but the names and titles promise an
interesting, constructive meeting of Wiki researchers. Angela will give
a general talk on Wikipedia and I'll do a workshop on Wikipedia
research, based on a review of the Wiki Research bibliography - so I
would be glad to meet you in Odense! If you think about participating in
the Workshop on Wikipedia Research please add yourself here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Workshop_on_Wikipedia_Research%2C_WikiSym_20…
The Workshop on Wiki Markup Standard is also relevant for Wikmedia if we
want to make our content more shareable - I'd like to see Brion there,
maybe the Foundation can send him?
At this year's Wikimania, there will also be a research event, but it
seems not to be decided yet:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Program/Research_thingy
I've seen that Fernanda Viegas will speak at both Wikimania and WikiSym,
and Semantic MediaWiki (which is really great by the way, I hope to get
it into Wikipedia soon!) will also be presentated at both conferences.
So there is some overlap, but in general WikiSym seems to be more
scientific orientated - I you are more lucky than me then just come to
both events! For WikiSym you should register until June 19th (in 10
days!) because its cheaper until this date!
Greetings and see you in Odense,
Jakob
I think this was intended for wiki-research-l(a)wikimedia.org...
See also the many replies already in the wikitech-l archives, starting with
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-June/036044.html.
Jeremy
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
Date: Jun 4, 2006 3:53 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Some statistics I wish I had...
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>,
wiki-research-l(a)wikia.com, Wikimedia developers
<wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org>
(Sorry for the cross posting, but there are several groups who might
find this interesting.)
For years now, it has been common for people to claim that "all the good
editors are jumping ship" or "we are losing our best people".
Generally, this has not proven to be true: people come and go, to be
sure, but as some people drift away, others have drifted in. Whether
the rate of burnout is "too high" or "too low" or "just right" is quite
hard to say.
However, it ought to be possible to at least quantify what that rate
actually is, by using the Erik Zachte statistics or a modification of them.
I would be fascinated if we could figure out such statistics as
"For any given edit, what is the average length of service of the
editor?" "For any given edit, what is the median length of service of
the editor?" These could be measured by either time since first edit,
or total number of edits or (perhaps best) some weighted average of the
edit history.
It would be nice to track that number over time... are we becoming
"younger" as a community, "older" as a community? Staying about the
same? Are old-timers sticking around longer than they used to, or
jumping ship faster?
There are also a whole set of related questions around newbies:
Are newbies more likely to stick around, or less likely to stick around,
than they were a year ago. Some people feel we are being overrun by
newbies, others feel that we are becoming a more closed and cliqueish
community which does not welcome newbies.
I would measure this by saying "Of people who made at least 100 edits a
month ago, how many of them made at least 100 edits this month". And
similar stats for "at least 10 edits". (Merely looking at "new
accounts" would not be right, because we had a huge spike in new account
creation when it became necessary to have an account to create a new page.)
--Jimbo
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Hi,
There is an interesting discussion on wikitech-l about statistics. Tim
has already generated some data - I collected the graphs at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Days_since_first_edit
and wrote something about it in my blog at
http://wm.sieheauch.de/?p=44
Because there still seem to be people that are not aware of the steep
distribution of activity per contributor: It's confirms [[Lotka's Law]]
- at least for the majority of contributors - a power law in the form
"contributors * edits^1.5 = constant" (see page 56f. in my masters
thesis [1]).
Greetings,
Jakob
[1] http://jakobvoss.de/magisterarbeit/MagisterarbeitJakobVoss.pdf (in
German)