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(a)mccme.ru <mailto:putevod@mccme.ru>>
My message is inspired by discussion in this thread
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/__Wikipedia:Administrators%27___noticeboard#Lo…
<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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