2012/4/18 Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru>

My message is inspired by discussion in this thread (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Loss_of_more_and_more_and_more_established_editors_and_administrators) on Englush Wikipedia. Whereas the thread itself is not relevant to this list, and the points get re-iterated on a regular basis, there were statements made there which contain quantitative estimates (for instance that 90% established users who leave do it because they get a new job or have their external life changed in some other way, and not because of harassment etc). Most probably these numbers are not really justified, but then I wanted to know what real numbers are. I am an Rcom member, but I can not recollect such research being accomplished (I might be wrong of course). I could not find data easily either (I spent half an hour because I remembered we had a Community Health initiative group which somehow evolved into the Movement Roles, but the Movement Roles pages on Meta do not talk about community health at all, and I could not even find an appropriate page to ask the question).

After this long introduction, does somebody know / can point out the answers to the questions:

1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on the number of contributions?

2. What are the main reasons why these editors stop editing? Is this correct, for instance, that external reasons are much more important than internal (on-wiki troubles and wiki-related harassment) reasons? The same for say those above 10000 edits?

Thanks in advance
Cheers
Yaroslav

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