Kerry<
To answer your point about "basic categorisation of the nature of edits" I
have two words for you: Revision Scoring
Aaron's last mail had the link.
As for your (and others') AWB edits, think of it as creating "findability".
Creating findability of content is at least as important as creating the
content you wish others to find.
I agree about the edit counts and it is the same problem as with page hits.
If you give people a measurement, they will conform their behavior to what
they perceive as desirable behavior to fit the measurement. We shouldn't
take our current measurements away, but dream up and implement new ones.
Jane
On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 1:33 AM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
*How old is the account making an average edit?*
What is this graph really telling us? While I understand what is being
plotted, I am not sure I know what it really means. Every year the age of
the “average editor” gets 6 months older. Of course as time passes, our
average editor gets older. That’s an entirely natural effect. I think we
have to correct for that to really understand what this graph is telling
us. I think one of the other graphs “Average Account Age by Editor Class”
maybe tells the story better – not so much as a trend over time (again
natural aging is not adjusted for), but rather that at any point in time,
the more active you are, the longer you are likely to have been around.
My initial reaction to these graphs was “gosh, those extremely active
editors are really contributing a lot” but I am wondering how true that is.
I am guessing that genuine newbies don’t add categories, don’t add
maintenance templates, use TW, AWB, etc. I am guessing newbies are trying
to add/edit informational content (and fixing spelling, grammar and
punctuation). What are our 1000+ edits-per-month folks doing? Adding
content? Changing categories. What’s the value to the Wikipedia of what
they do? Now I need to be a little bit careful here with the word “value” –
it’s a bit loaded. How does the addition of content compare against a
vandalism revert or a recategorisation or fixing a date format (I’m running
an AWB to fix dates in Australian articles to DMY format at the moment)?
Hmm. Clearly if nobody adds content, the encyclopedia doesn’t grow. Clearly
if nobody reverts vandalism, the content is far less reliable. Not so clear
what the consequences are about categorisation and date formats, useful but
probably not as useful as the other two which are primarily focussed on the
information content. What about an edit on a user talk page to help a
newbie? If that keeps the newbie engaged and more effective, there’s a
multiplier effect above and beyond the contributions of the original
editor. Of course an interaction on a user talk page that discourages a
newbie can have a negative multiplier effect.
Notwithstanding sentiment issues, it would still be very nice to be able
to have some basic categorisation of the nature of edits. Article vs Talk
vs User Talk vs Project vs …. And then for articles is the diff about
informational content or “housekeeping”. And then to know whether a
contributor’s pattern of behaviour is changing over time and whether our
apparently very-productive-editors (by edit count) are being very
productive in the “front office”, the “back office” or fending off the bad
guys, or actually not adding that much value (but keeping up that important
edit count).
And interesting experiment (which I am sure we would not be allowed to
run) would be to not allow people to see edit counts and not see the list
of other users’ contributions. It would be interesting to see if people’s
behaviour changed if we took “edit counts” away as a status symbol. Would
some people be demotivated? Would behaviour towards others change if they
couldn’t establish relative status via edit counts or extent of
contributions?
Kerry
*From:* wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *
masssly(a)ymail.com
*Sent:* Tuesday, 4 August 2015 6:18 AM
*To:* Wikimedia Research Mailing List <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
*Subject:* [Wiki-research-l] The Wikimedia
Research Newsletter 5(7) is out
The July 2015 issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter is out:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/03/research-newsletter-july-2015/
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/July
In this issue:
- 1 Wikipedia as an example of collective intelligence
- 2 #Wikipedia and Twitter
- 3 Briefly
- 3.1 How old is the account making an average edit?
- 3.2 Simplifying sentences by finding their equivalent on Simple
Wikipedia
••• 3 publications were covered in this issue •••
Thanks to Piotr Konieczny and Kim Osman for contributing.
Masssly, Tilman Bayer and Dario Taraborelli
---
Wikimedia Research Newsletter
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/
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