On 10/10/07, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
I would expect the survivorship bias goes in the wrong direction though. Presumably pages that will be deleted, but haven't yet been, are more likely to be young. Hence the not-yet-deleted pages would seem to want to make recent edit counts higher. I can't think of any reason why survivorship effects would lead to a bump 6+ months ago.
You're probably right about the effects, but I'm not really sure. The choice to exclude redirects also would probably have a similar effect, but again I can't be sure. And the breakdown of registered/unregistered and reverted/nonreverted would probably also be affected. The conclusion that there has been a decline in edits recently would almost definitely still apply, but the shape of the curve would be different, the timing of the decline might be different, and the mix of edits would probably be different.
4-6 months ago there was a lot of deletion and conversion to redirects surrounding BLP issues. For instance, Daniel Brandt's article, which had around 3000 edits, was converted into a redirect. But this article had no chance of being picked by the random selection, because it was turned into a redirect.
And such biases would have no impact on the analysis of account creation, protections, or blocking. All of which also show drops.
Yes, I think you're right that the activity rate (in the article space, at least) has been declining. At the same time the traffic apparently has been increasing (according to alexa, at least). What about the activity rate in the non-article space?