Hello guys.
First of all, kudos for this initiative! It's great that all researchers in this list
can get to know the names and interests of WMF staff working on same topics.
Additional context for Piotr. Believe me, it's really challenging to define a set of
clear, and *exact* conditions to consider that any wikipedian ceased to contribute.
For our analysis published by WSJ last November, we followed similar requirements to those
in the Former Contributors Survey. In particular, we established 3 months of inactivity as
a "reasonable" period to consider that an editor took a long break. The main
difference is that in the Survey they focus on editors who reached at least a reasonable
number of lifetime revisions (20-99), while we included everyone.
I already broke down the net gain curve for different cohorts, according to number of
edits, and there is no significant change in the trends (I believe that the meaningful
info is the slope, not the numbers).
For what is worth, I think the best constructive critic we received about this approach
came from Jimmy Wales. Jimmy explained a useful twist to the methodology, that they seem
to be applying for internal metrics at Wikia.
Instead of trying to measure how many people "left", which will always have
methodological drawbacks, we can ask the following question: what percentage of editors
survived up to a certain age?
For instance: what's the percentage of editors who made at least 20 lifetime edits who
are still active one month later? Three months later? And then: is that percentage
improving, constant, or getting worse over time?
Indeed, limiting the scope to recorded revisions (the only event we can certainly measure)
we avoid many of these methodological problems.
I'm still spending time with flagged-revisions, but in case Howie or anybody else is
interested, it shouldn't be difficult to have a look at this.
BTW, Howie thanks for uploading the survey slides. Terrific the work you did, guys.
Cheers,
Felipe.
--- El mar, 10/8/10, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> escribió:
De: Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl>
Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] WMF Staff Introductions.
Para: "Research into Wikimedia content and communities"
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Fecha: martes, 10 de agosto, 2010 20:21
Welcome!
I have to say that
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results
of
which I've just learned from your post is an excellent
piece of
research, one that was needed for a very long time.
One question comes to mind: we now, roughly, how many
editors we are
gaining per months. Are there any estimates on how many we
are losing
(per month, year, total)? I cannot find such numbers in
that survey.
--
Piotr Konieczny
Parul Vora wrote:
Hello everyone,
We (most of the current staff at the Wikimedia
Foundation currently
engaging in research) had a chance to meet some
of you
at Wikisym and
Wikimania this year and thought it would be nice
to
introduce ourselves
and say hi to all of you! All of us have joined
WMF in
the past two
years and are working on projects or research
questions that may be
relevant or of interest to all of you. Also, as
far as
I know, we are
all new to this list and will hopefully be
talking and
collaborating
with you more in the future - both here and on
the
Meta Research page.
So, in no particular order, some introductions from
all of us:
From Nimish
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Nimish_Gautam>
(ngautam(a)wikimedia.org):
Hi, I'm Nimish Gautam. I started with the
foundation in 2009 doing development for the
Usability
Initiative, which
focused on new editors. I like analyzing user
behavior
to figure out how
people use the tools we give them (turning
templates
into a programming
language, who would've guessed?) and spotting
trends
so we can improve
those tools to help people accomplish what it is
they're trying to do.
Currently I'm doing qualitative and
quantitative
research on user
behavior for the foundation and its various
projects,
and very
interested in finding ways of chunking all this
information together to
make pretty, compelling, informative resources so
people know what's
going on in the wikiverse and hopefully want to
be a
part of it.
From Howie
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#User_Experience_Programs>
(hfung(a)wikimedia.org):
Hello! I'm Howie and I'm a Senior Product Manager
at the Wikimedia Foundation. As a product person,
I'd
like to work with
the community towards more data-driven decision
making. One area I'm
particularly interested in is getting a better
understanding of our
user's lifecycle with our projects -- how
they come to
the projects, how
they start contributing, their experiences as a
contributor, why they
leave, and why they return. I like to use both
quantitative and
qualitative methods to obtain as complete a
picture as
we need to guide
our decisions. On the quantitative side, I'm
working
on getting better
web analytics for our projects. I'm also
interested in
any data mining
projects along these lines (e.g., contribution
behavior, user lifecycle
patterns, etc.). On the qualitative side, I
worked on
the "Why Editors
Leave Wikipedia" survey and would be
interested in
other qualitative
measurements (e.g., interviews, surveys, focus
groups). If you're
interested in any of the above topics, please
drop me
a line.
From Amy
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Public_Policy_Initiative>
(aroth(a)wikimedia.org):
Hi, I'm Amy, the Research Analyst for the Public
Policy Initiative
<http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative>.
My task
is to assess the project's impact on: U.S.
public
policy article
quality, public policy categorization, new
articles,
and new
contributors. Through the project I have focused
on
article quality
assessment, and worked with the community to add
a
quantitative value to
the current article assessment
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Quality_rating#Rubric>.
As a data analyst, I am interested in improving data
accessibility from
Wikipedia. In my dreams, I envision data from the
assessment tools that
exist within Wikipedia are captured in a
real-time
database, so that we
can observe what is currently happening in
Wikipedia
and how it is
evolving in the present, rather than having to
use
data dumps to get
snapshots of the state of Wikipedia. I have
experience
analyzing and
designing surveys and would like to use that
experience to take a more
in depth look at contributor demographics and
motivations. I am excited
to be a part of this huge collaborative project
with a
mission to make
knowledge accessible.
From me, Parul Vora
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Parulvora>
(pvora(a)wikimedia.org):
Hi Everyone! I'm a researcher and designer with a
focus on participatory and collaborative spaces.
I
started at the
Wikimedia Foundation in 2009 and moving forward
have
interest in:
creating new forms of participation (beyond
editing)
on the projects
that better engage a wider audience with the
content
and each other;
assessing, evaluating and addressing the
demographic
and cultural biases
in our projects; and exploring location, culture
and
language as they
affect the development patterns of different
language
Wikipedias in an
effort to identify potential for experimentation
and
catalysis in
younger projects. I'm currently exploring the
potential effect feedback
systems (article ratings, expert reviews,
visualizations of an article's
history or a user's contributions) can have
on the
engagement of
readers, actions of editors, and the quality of
content over time. I
like infovis, ux research, and unresearched
innovation
and I am
interested in learning more about research with
wikipedia on motivation,
behavioral economic modeling and/or game theory,
using
geolocative data,
mobile experiences, and profiling and trend
visualizations......and your
work too!
Let us know if you're interested in learning more,
participating in, or
contributing to our efforts. And drop any of us a
line
if we could learn
from or contribute to what you've been
working
on.......
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