On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 14:18, Ting Chen tchen@wikimedia.org wrote:
I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update [2], and the editor trends study itself [3]. It is a deeply important topic, and each report is only a few pages long. ...
The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing our movement. ...
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/March_25-26 [2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update [3] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update
Hi Ting,
One of the things I wondered about the editor trends study is whether it focused only on user names, as opposed to people.
It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit."
A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new identities, sometimes multiple ones. Any regular editor will tell you that this happens a lot, for various reasons. Accounts are banned; privacy is compromised; people acquire a certain reputation with an account and want to start over; or they want a break from being User X, for whatever reason, and become User Y for a while.
Did the study do anything to correlate number of accounts with number of people?
Sarah