On Tuesday 21 October 2008, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
::Archived at: http://marc.info/?i=dcb629f40810210852i22347d92qe56f078b6e7dbc38@mail.gmail....
Hello,
From time to time I ask myself (and others) what is a "regular
contributor" to a Wikipedia language edition.
How categories are constituted are central to the findings one claims. (As Han-Teng said, these are analytical categories and we are researchers and on a research list, meaning we're not making judgements of worth, but trying to understand a phenomenon.) If one looks at the whole line of research on "elite v. bourgeoisie" it turns out that researchers' finding differ based on how they define "contribution" (small tweaks, winnowing, talk page usage, integration/flow edits) and the classes of users (elite and bourgeoisie) -- this latter point about classes of users can be seen in (Ortega and Gonzalez-Barahona 2007, Ortega and Gonzalez-Barahona 2008). But, as a (not-very-active) Wikipedian, I'm grateful for all such contributions.
In my usage of "active" users [1] and admins [2], I rely upon the natives' categorization ;).
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:About&oldid=21649628... [2]:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_administrators&a...
Ziko's definition sounds appropriate to me and I think it's a good question as this community at some point might want to move towards consistent definitions for such things.