It is an interesting but complex topic.
Complications include:
- People shift project - some of the early EN wikipedians may
now be mostly active in their own language versions of
Wikipedia. The recent high profile retirement at EN wikipedia
is an editor still active on Commons
- People shift Account. Some of our "former" accounts are
known to belong to people who now edit under other names. Some
others may be doing so without disclosing their former
account.
- We have had some deaths
That said there is definitely a pattern of the most active
Wikipedians sticking around, and I'm pretty sure that whether or
not someone is an admin makes quite a difference there. We have
circa 750 active admins - 732 today http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_administrators&action=history
and we've appointed less than 250 in the last three years. so the
vast majority of our admins have been admins for much longer and
editors for even longer than that. I suspect that our failure to
appoint more admins is one of the things that is holding the
community back and slowing recruitment into the core of editors
who stick around and are our most active.
Of the nearly 1500 Wikipedian admins (active and inactive) only
150 first edited in the last five years, and that includes 8
bots. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&dir=prev&offset=3020778&username=&group=sysop&creationSort=1
So at least 90% of the human admins first edited over five years
ago, and the other 10% are heavily skewed to the 48-60 month
group.
I appreciate that we can't expect someone to pass RFA within a
year of their first edit. But that still leaves a huge gap - a
generation of editors who started in 2008-2010 and aren't admins
or even necessarily still editors.
WereSpielChequers
On 19 April 2012 13:19, emijrp
<emijrp@gmail.com>
wrote:
This thread is a good candidate for wiki-research-l.
Forwarding...
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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Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral
student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
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