"Until we can prove it is good data we should treat it as good data" is not how data works.
Absent exactly that analysis it is almost certainly a bad idea for us to declare this to be good news; validate, /then/ celebrate.
On 24 August 2015 at 12:26, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
100 edits a month does indeed have the disadvantage that all edits are not equal, there may be some people for whom that represents 100 hours contributed, others a single hour. So an individual month could be inflated by something as trivial as a vandalfighting bot going down for a couple of days and a bunch of oldtimers responding to a call on IRC by coming back and running huggle for an hour.
But 7 months in a row where the total is higher than the same month the previous year looks to me like a pattern.
Across the 3,000 or so editors on English wikipedia who contribute over a hundred edits per month there could be a hidden pattern of an increase in Huggle, stiki and AWB users more than offsetting a decline in manual editing, but unless anyone analyses that and reruns those stats on some metric such as "unique calender hours in which someone saves an edit" I think it best to treat this as an imperfect indicator of community health. I'm not suggesting that we are out of the woods - there are other indicators that are still looking bad, and I would love to see a better proxy for active editors. But this is good news.
On 23 August 2015 at 19:31, Mark J. Nelson mjn@anadrome.org wrote:
WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com writes:
Could you be more specific re "In general I'm not sure the 100+ count is among the most reliable." What in particular do you think is unreliable about that metric?
The main thing I have questions about with that metric is whether it's a good proxy for editing activity in general, or is dominated by fluctuations in "bookkeeping" contributions, i.e. people doing mass-moves of categories and that kind of thing (which makes it quite easy to get to 100 edits). This has long been a complaint about edit counts as a metric, which have never really been solidly validated.
Looking through my own personal editing history, it looks like there's an anti-correlation between hitting the 100-edit threshold and making more substantial edits. In months when I work on article-writing I typically have only 20-30 edits, because each edit takes a lot of library research, so I can't make more than one or two a day. In months where I do more bookkeeping-type edits I can easily have 500 or 1000 edits.
But that's just for me; it's certainly possible that Wikipedia-wide, there's a good correlation between raw edit count and other kinds of desirable activity measures. But is there evidence of that?
-- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org
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