Dear Jan,
It's a fascinating topic and one that interests me as well.
But you have to be careful with your assumptions, our data is almost always based on user accounts, but we'd like to think we are looking at people. Some of whom will have different accounts over time. Some of the involvement will switch between projects - apparently half the founding Wikidata community were previously active in the movement. Some will spend periods of their volunteer time off wiki - many very active volunteers put time in as Arbcom members, OTRS volunteers or chapter trustees.
Volunteers are very very different to staff or even subscribers, barely 16 years into the project we simply don't have the data to workout longterm patterns of retention and reactivation, but the signs so far are that Wikipedia is beginning to look like other volunteer organisations that people have a multi decade relationship with.
A few years ago the WMF did a survey of former editors, partly to learn why they'd left. One of the most common responses was "I haven't left yet".
WSC
On 20 March 2017 at 09:34, Jan Dittrich jan.dittrich@wikimedia.de wrote:
Hello,
I am looking for research on how editors transition through various levels of involvement in their time as editors. The questions I ask myself are:
- How many people to come each month?
- How many editors leave?
…those are not too difficult to answer but…
- How many people become more involved over time? E.g. How many each month
come to a level where they are interested in handling many pages on the watchlist, learn the less obvious aspects of wiki culture etc.
In my work as designer I am often involved in features for intermediate and/or very involved users and I’m wondering if there are any ballpark estimates of how many people learn these features each month.
Jan
-- Jan Dittrich UX Design/ User Research
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0 http://wikimedia.de
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