Let me attempt to broaden and slightly critique the version of
productivity this thread has been considering so far. It seems
somewhat limiting to discuss productivity solely in terms of what
content makes it into an article. For one, this assumes that articles
are somehow independent -- text that is reverted from one article will
not reappear in another article. For some articles this is an ok
assumption, while for others its way off. We've observed editors who
push their viewpoint across a wide set of thematically related
articles.
This way of considering productivity also does not account for how
seemingly unproductive edits may impact the editing process (meta
impact if you will). As one example, a controversial edit that is
eventually reverted may generate insightful discussion on the talk
page. This discussion can impact future edits (and not just on the
same article). To be more concrete, highly controversial pages (e.g.
Jesus) maintain oodles of archives of discussions (many of which
originated with controversial edits). Newcomers are socialized into
the practices surrounding an article by being pointed to these
discussions whenever they bring up topics that have been extensively
discussed in the past. I would consider edits that generate such
discussions to be productive.
A reverted edit on an article page may be productive in other ways as
well. For example, it may spark discussion that leads to edits to
policy pages. And I'm completely at a loss at how to evaluate
productivity of edits in the WP namespace. Word count may be an ok
proxy for completeness of an article on a topic, but it is clearly the
wrong productivity metric for things like policy pages.
thanks,
ivan.