How old is the account making an average edit?
What is this graph really telling us? While I understand what is being plotted, I am not
sure I know what it really means. Every year the age of the “average editor” gets 6 months
older. Of course as time passes, our average editor gets older. That’s an entirely natural
effect. I think we have to correct for that to really understand what this graph is
telling us. I think one of the other graphs “Average Account Age by Editor Class” maybe
tells the story better – not so much as a trend over time (again natural aging is not
adjusted for), but rather that at any point in time, the more active you are, the longer
you are likely to have been around.
My initial reaction to these graphs was “gosh, those extremely active editors are really
contributing a lot” but I am wondering how true that is. I am guessing that genuine
newbies don’t add categories, don’t add maintenance templates, use TW, AWB, etc. I am
guessing newbies are trying to add/edit informational content (and fixing spelling,
grammar and punctuation). What are our 1000+ edits-per-month folks doing? Adding content?
Changing categories. What’s the value to the Wikipedia of what they do? Now I need to be a
little bit careful here with the word “value” – it’s a bit loaded. How does the addition
of content compare against a vandalism revert or a recategorisation or fixing a date
format (I’m running an AWB to fix dates in Australian articles to DMY format at the
moment)? Hmm. Clearly if nobody adds content, the encyclopedia doesn’t grow. Clearly if
nobody reverts vandalism, the content is far less reliable. Not so clear what the
consequences are about categorisation and date formats, useful but probably not as useful
as the other two which are primarily focussed on the information content. What about an
edit on a user talk page to help a newbie? If that keeps the newbie engaged and more
effective, there’s a multiplier effect above and beyond the contributions of the original
editor. Of course an interaction on a user talk page that discourages a newbie can have a
negative multiplier effect.
Notwithstanding sentiment issues, it would still be very nice to be able to have some
basic categorisation of the nature of edits. Article vs Talk vs User Talk vs Project vs ….
And then for articles is the diff about informational content or “housekeeping”. And then
to know whether a contributor’s pattern of behaviour is changing over time and whether our
apparently very-productive-editors (by edit count) are being very productive in the “front
office”, the “back office” or fending off the bad guys, or actually not adding that much
value (but keeping up that important edit count).
And interesting experiment (which I am sure we would not be allowed to run) would be to
not allow people to see edit counts and not see the list of other users’ contributions. It
would be interesting to see if people’s behaviour changed if we took “edit counts” away as
a status symbol. Would some people be demotivated? Would behaviour towards others change
if they couldn’t establish relative status via edit counts or extent of contributions?
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of masssly(a)ymail.com
Sent: Tuesday, 4 August 2015 6:18 AM
To: Wikimedia Research Mailing List <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] The Wikimedia Research Newsletter 5(7) is out
The July 2015 issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter is out:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/03/research-newsletter-july-2015/
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/July
In this issue:
* 1 Wikipedia as an example of collective intelligence
* 2 #Wikipedia and Twitter
* 3 Briefly
* 3.1 How old is the account making an average edit?
* 3.2 Simplifying sentences by finding their equivalent on Simple Wikipedia
••• 3 publications were covered in this issue •••
Thanks to Piotr Konieczny and Kim Osman for contributing.
Masssly, Tilman Bayer and Dario Taraborelli
---
Wikimedia Research Newsletter
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/
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