I don't think Jonathan was saying we should buy a full page adin the NYT
and declare editor retention solved. I share his cautious optimism. The
*rate* of the editor decline has decreased along several metrics, and we're
seeing an intriguing uptick in 100+ editor activity.
Back in 2011, when he and I (and several others on this list) were
participating in the Summer of Research, the month-over-month metrics were
decreasing at a rate that was kind of alarming. Some combination of factors
seems to have changed that pattern. Worth looking into.
J
On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
"Until we can prove it is good data we should
treat it as good data"
is not how data works.
Absent exactly that analysis it is almost certainly a bad idea for us
to declare this to be good news; validate, /then/ celebrate.
On 24 August 2015 at 12:26, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
100 edits a month does indeed have the
disadvantage that all edits are
not
equal, there may be some people for whom that
represents 100 hours
contributed, others a single hour. So an individual month could be
inflated
by something as trivial as a vandalfighting bot
going down for a couple
of
days and a bunch of oldtimers responding to a
call on IRC by coming back
and
running huggle for an hour.
But 7 months in a row where the total is higher than the same month the
previous year looks to me like a pattern.
Across the 3,000 or so editors on English wikipedia who contribute over a
hundred edits per month there could be a hidden pattern of an increase in
Huggle, stiki and AWB users more than offsetting a decline in manual
editing, but unless anyone analyses that and reruns those stats on some
metric such as "unique calender hours in which someone saves an edit" I
think it best to treat this as an imperfect indicator of community
health.
I'm not suggesting that we are out of the
woods - there are other
indicators
that are still looking bad, and I would love to
see a better proxy for
active editors. But this is good news.
On 23 August 2015 at 19:31, Mark J. Nelson <mjn(a)anadrome.org> wrote:
>
> WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Could you be more specific re "In general I'm not sure the 100+ count
is
> > among the most reliable." What in
particular do you think is
unreliable
about that metric?
The main thing I have questions about with that metric is whether it's a
good proxy for editing activity in general, or is dominated by
fluctuations in "bookkeeping" contributions, i.e. people doing
mass-moves of categories and that kind of thing (which makes it quite
easy to get to 100 edits). This has long been a complaint about edit
counts as a metric, which have never really been solidly validated.
Looking through my own personal editing history, it looks like there's
an anti-correlation between hitting the 100-edit threshold and making
more substantial edits. In months when I work on article-writing I
typically have only 20-30 edits, because each edit takes a lot of
library research, so I can't make more than one or two a day. In months
where I do more bookkeeping-type edits I can easily have 500 or 1000
edits.
But that's just for me; it's certainly possible that Wikipedia-wide,
there's a good correlation between raw edit count and other kinds of
desirable activity measures. But is there evidence of that?
--
Mark J. Nelson
Anadrome Research
http://www.kmjn.org
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Oliver Keyes
Count Logula
Wikimedia Foundation
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