Hi Amir,
This is an interesting idea. I haven't found a way to detect whether an editor is native or not. My approach to multingual editing is through the concept of having a primary-non primary Wikipedias. Your primary Wikipedia is the one where you have made more edits to (and you are a primary editor there). In the rest of Wikipedias where you have at least an edit, you are a non-primary editor.
I'm currently creating a database in which for every Wikipedia I have a table with a column specifying whether an editor is primary from this language or non-primary, another one with the primary language, another one with how many other languages they interacted with and a final one with the total number of edits in all languages.
An editor behaves quite differently when he is primary or non-primary in terms of social interactions, topical diversity, etc. To me, this is interesting because it allows me to detect when an editor "exports" content (edits content about their local area, usually politics-related content, in other languages).
Assessing the impact of these "technical helpful editors" may not be easy as we'd need to examine the characteristics of the edits. However, quantifying the extent of edits made by non-primary editors is doable. Would that help you?
Best,
Marc Miquel
Missatge de Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il del dia dc., 5 de juny 2019 a les 10:54:
Hi,
There is a phenomenon in Wikipedias in smaller languages: There activity level of people who actually know the language of the wiki and make meaningful text contributions is relatively low, and the activity of people from other wikis who make various technical edits that don't require the knowledge of the language is relatively high.
I call the latter group "helpful strangers". They can do things such as fixing categories, fixing invalid wiki syntax, editing templates, adding images, etc.—things that don't require knowing the language well, and can be achieved by copying and pasting, by guessing things from interlanguage links, or by writing language-neutral things, such as numbers or filenames.
Now, I've written "relatively low" and "relatively high", but these are just my anecdotal impressions. Has anyone thought of a way to quantify this more precisely?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l