http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532431335938862.ht... September 2011
Adding more editors “is one of our top priorities for the year,” says Howie Fung…aims to increase the number of editors across all languages of Wikipedia to 95,000 from 81,450 by June of next year.
From http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm using the >5
edits a month metric used in WMF docs:
1. July 2012: 76,400 2. June 2012: 74,402 3. May 2012: 76,956 4. April 2012: 75,141 5. March 2012; 76,274
The high water mark, incidentally, seems to have been March 2007 with 90,618 editors >5 edits that month. So we have been shrinking ~2.8k editors a year ((91 - 77) / (2012 - 2007)). In retrospect, my 75% prediction that this priority would not be achieved (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/3241) was ludicrously optimistic, given that the 95k editor mark has *never* been reached.
On 4 September 2012 21:01, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532431335938862.ht... September 2011
Adding more editors “is one of our top priorities for the year,” says Howie Fung…aims to increase the number of editors across all languages of Wikipedia to 95,000 from 81,450 by June of next year.
From http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm using the >5 edits a month metric used in WMF docs:
- July 2012: 76,400
- June 2012: 74,402
- May 2012: 76,956
- April 2012: 75,141
- March 2012; 76,274
The high water mark, incidentally, seems to have been March 2007 with 90,618 editors >5 edits that month. So we have been shrinking ~2.8k editors a year ((91 - 77) / (2012 - 2007)). In retrospect, my 75% prediction that this priority would not be achieved (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/3241) was ludicrously optimistic, given that the 95k editor mark has *never* been reached.
I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-ed...
The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use!
I've quickly graphed the recent numbers (just focusing on the period after the initial exponential growth, so starting in 2007):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_r...
It seems that the rate of decline may be slowing, at least. Which I guess is something.
The really interesting part comes from separating out the data for the English Wikipedia, which is 30% down from its 2007 peak, down from 50,000 editors to 35,000 - the graph is smoother, but otherwise looks very similar to the first one. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_r...
In fact, the decline on en.wp is so steep that it actually represents almost all the overall decline in the projects; if you look at the totals for every project except en.wp, the graph jumps around a bit but is actually quite stable. Since the start of 2008, the three-month moving average has always been 40,000 editors +- 5%.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_r...
One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this.
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-ed...
The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use!
Whups.
One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this.
Perhaps the damage has already been done on En? I would've suggested that maybe the WMF retention initiatives might have not failed entirely, except I don't remember any of them being finished in 2010, much less being able to affect the overall wiki so much.
One of my experiences from the death anomaly project is that different language communities vary quite sharply as to their tolerance of unsourced edits.
I suspect that by 2010 the English Wikipedia had already gone through the transition on this, and that those editors we were going to lose by having their unsourced edits reverted had largely gone. We still lose a large proportion of newbies, and I think we should find better ways to communicate with those who make unsourced edits. But I can understand that this would lead to EN wiki being further on the path to a smaller community that edits to a more rigorous standard.
What would be interesting would be to chart our different communities and their retention rates by the point that they went through various transitions. This could test both the theory that reversion of goodfaith but unsourced edits is causing the change, and it would test and I hope disprove the theory that flagged revisions deters new editors.
The other big change that has happened on EN and is EN specific is the growth of other projects that may have syphoned away a large proportion of editors who started in EN. Has anyone used SUL to chart patterns of editors shifting their project focus? My suspicion is that many formerly active EN Wikipedians are still active elsewhere in Wikimedia, it would be interesting to know which were our recruiter and destination projects and how that has changed over time.
WSC,
On 5 September 2012 01:57, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% -
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-ed...
The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use!
Whups.
One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event;
the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this.
Perhaps the damage has already been done on En? I would've suggested that maybe the WMF retention initiatives might have not failed entirely, except I don't remember any of them being finished in 2010, much less being able to affect the overall wiki so much.
-- gwern http://www.gwern.net