Hi,
Regarding the first question there are some studies about retention patterns and about the editor lifetime distribution, but I am afraid your specific question of relating lifetime to the number of contributions was not addressed in any of them:
* The Editor Trends Study performed a longitudinal study of editor retention https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study * This paper by Dennis Wilkinson at EC'08 looked at lifetime as a function of the number of contributions and found similarities between Wikipedia and other social production communities (gated) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1386837 (open access) http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/regularities/regularities.pdf * A short contribution of mine to ICWSM 2010 looked at the lifetime distribution of 5 Wikipedias (EN,DE,FR,PT,IT) https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/view/1517 * My sprint for the Wikimedia Summer of Research of last year looked at how editing activity changes over the lifetime of the average editor. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_lifecycle
Regarding the second question I am not aware of studies that looked at the causes of departure of long-term editors but I must admit I am a bit sloppy on that side of the literature (especially survey studies) so any pointer would be highly appreciated.
Cheers
Giovanni
On 04/19/2012 02:19 PM, emijrp wrote:
This thread is a good candidate for wiki-research-l. Forwarding...
2012/4/18 Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru mailto: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 <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 _________________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.__org <mailto:Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/__mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l>
-- Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain) Projects: AVBOT http://code.google.com/p/avbot/ | StatMediaWiki http://statmediawiki.forja.rediris.es | WikiEvidens http://code.google.com/p/wikievidens/ | WikiPapers http://wikipapers.referata.com | WikiTeam http://code.google.com/p/wikiteam/ Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
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