Is there any way of telling what proportion of these 8% appear to be using the Visual Editor either exclusively or partially? It might be interesting to track the take-up of the VE (fully or partially) by editor by year of original signup.

Kerry

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers
Sent: Saturday, 15 August 2015 11:12 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>; The Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee mailing list <rcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip?

Hi,

With 8% more editors contributing over 100 edits in June 2015 than in  June 2014, we have now had six consecutive months where this particular metric of the core community is looking positive. One or two months could easily be a statistical blip, especially when you compare calender months that may have 5 weekends in one year and four the next. But 6 months in a row does begin to look like a change in pattern.

As far as caveats go I'm aware of several of the reasons why raw edit count is a suspect measure, but I'm not aware of anything that has come in in this year that would have artificially inflated edit counts and brought more of the under  100 editors into the >100 group.

I know there was a recent speedup, which should increase subsequent edit rates, and one of the edit filters got disabled in June, but neither of those should be relevant to the Jan-May period.

Would anyone on this list be aware of something that would have otherwise thrown that statistic?

Otherwise I'm considering submitting something to the Signpost.

Regards

Jonathan