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@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of masssly@ymail.com
Sent: Tuesday, 4 August 2015 6:18 AM
To: Wikimedia Research Mailing List <wiki-research-l@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:
In this issue:
••• 3 publications were covered in this issue •••
Thanks to Piotr Konieczny and Kim Osman for contributing.
Masssly, Tilman Bayer and Dario Taraborelli
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Wikimedia Research Newsletter
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/
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