It is an interesting but complex topic. Complications include: 1. 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 2. 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. 3. 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&… <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&am… <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 &lt;emijrp(a)gmail.com <mailto:emijrp@gmail.com>> wrote: This thread is a good candidate for wiki-research-l. Forwarding... 2012/4/18 Yaroslav M. Blanter &lt;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#Loss_o…) 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Unsubscribe: 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/ _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l