Re: [Wiki-research-l] Research on Edit Size

Dear Haifeng Zhang, If I were you, looking at this, I'd watch out for templates. Templates particularly substituted ones involve a lot of bytes that someone hasn't typed. I recently did an edit that involved me typing {{subst|Infobox academic}} you might be surprised how many bytes that generated. And how many more key depressions that edit involved compared to my typical edit. Similarly reversion can involve adding a lot of bytes, but on further inspection you might simple be reverting a vandal who removed four paragraphs of text that others had contributed. You might also want to look at an editors edit rate per hour, and time since their previous edit. If their previous edit was half an hour earlier they might have been making a cup of tea, cutting the grass or taking a phone call, or they might have spent half an hour on that edit. But if they have made forty edits in that previous half hour then you are pretty safe to assume that those edits on average represent less than a minute of work. As well as what Kerry said, there are two things you might want to take into consideration. Firstly those of us with experience of breaking news stories quickly learn the hard way to save little and often, especially on a topical subject. Take for example the article on Sarah Palin in the hours after she was announced as John McCain's running mate. My memory was of multiple concurrent edit wars and a tidal wave of vandalism, I went back later and measured it as peaking at 25 edits per minute, I don't think we even log the edits lost to edit conflicts, but in practice anyone clicking the edit button at the top was going to get an edit conflict - your only chance of getting an edit to save would have been to edit by section. Secondly, over time editors pick up tools, some of which make a big difference to edit rates. Edit summaries are a good indicator of this, watch for words such as Twinkle, Hotcat, Huggle and AWB. I haven't used Catalot on Wikipedia, but it is the reason why my edit count is higher on Wikimedia commons, despite my spending rather more time on Wikipedia. Regards Jonathan On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 22:44, Haifeng Zhang <haifeng1(a)andrew.cmu.edu> wrote: