It is an interesting but complex topic.
Complications include:
1. People shift project - some of the early EN wikipedians may now be
mostly active in their own language versions of Wikipedia. The recent high
profile retirement at EN wikipedia is an editor still active on Commons
2. People shift Account. Some of our "former" accounts are known to
belong to people who now edit under other names. Some others may be doing
so without disclosing their former account.
3. We have had some deaths
That said there is definitely a pattern of the most active Wikipedians
sticking around, and I'm pretty sure that whether or not someone is an
admin makes quite a difference there. We have circa 750 active admins - 732
today
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_administrators&…
we've appointed less than 250 in the last three years. so the vast
majority of our admins have been admins for much longer and editors for
even longer than that. I suspect that our failure to appoint more admins is
one of the things that is holding the community back and slowing
recruitment into the core of editors who stick around and are our most
active.
Of the nearly 1500 Wikipedian admins (active and inactive) only 150 first
edited in the last five years, and that includes 8 bots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&dir=prev&am…
at least 90% of the human admins first edited over five years ago, and
the other 10% are heavily skewed to the 48-60 month group.
I appreciate that we can't expect someone to pass RFA within a year of
their first edit. But that still leaves a huge gap - a generation of
editors who started in 2008-2010 and aren't admins or even necessarily
still editors.
WereSpielChequers
On 19 April 2012 13:19, emijrp <emijrp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This thread is a good candidate for wiki-research-l.
Forwarding...
2012/4/18 Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru>
My message is inspired by discussion in this
thread (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Administrators%27_**
noticeboard#Loss_of_more_and_**more_and_more_established_**
editors_and_administrators<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Admini…)
on Englush Wikipedia. Whereas the thread itself is not relevant to this
list, and the points get re-iterated on a regular basis, there were
statements made there which contain quantitative estimates (for instance
that 90% established users who leave do it because they get a new job or
have their external life changed in some other way, and not because of
harassment etc). Most probably these numbers are not really justified, but
then I wanted to know what real numbers are. I am an Rcom member, but I can
not recollect such research being accomplished (I might be wrong of
course). I could not find data easily either (I spent half an hour because
I remembered we had a Community Health initiative group which somehow
evolved into the Movement Roles, but the Movement Roles pages on Meta do
not talk about community health at all, and I could not even find an
appropriate page to ask the question).
After this long introduction, does somebody know / can point out the
answers to the questions:
1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the
one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but
I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend
on the number of contributions?
2. What are the main reasons why these editors stop editing? Is this
correct, for instance, that external reasons are much more important than
internal (on-wiki troubles and wiki-related harassment) reasons? The same
for say those above 10000 edits?
Thanks in advance
Cheers
Yaroslav
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Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
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