Greetings James. Your response here seems unhelpful and mind I suggest,
snarky. You are essentially arguing over semantics. You object to the usage
of a term - "core editing community", then suggest his titles is faulty and
misleading while suggesting almost antithetical alternatives. You end by
questioning his logic, suggesting that might just be vandalism being
reverted, while ending it all with what you plan on doing with this next?
It certainly seems like more is going on here behind the scenes than what
one can infer from reading. The article mentions Erik Zachte, who I would
always trust on these numbers, that "The growth seems real to me". It also
mentions lila's different leadership style that may be bearing fruit.
Please have another read at your response. I read a nice email earlier from
Lila on this list[1], about distracting with polarizing rhetorics. And to
bring up issues, in good faith and with care for each other. I hope staff
members, especially senior members, along with other readers, take note.
On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 9:22 PM, James Forrester <jforrester(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Interesting data, but it's just data, not a conclusion.
Also, and a bit off-topic, "core editing community" is a pretty offensive
term to use for "editors who make more than 100 edits a month",
disregarding the continuing editors who make fewer than 100 edits as
non-core regardless of the value they add to the wikis; the normal term is
"very active editors" to avoid implicit disparagement.
That would be just an opinion, and that too, over terminology not the data.
Interesting data though, you are correct.
I don't believe that term is offensive, other opinions may differ. However,
what I don't know if it's the new terminology WMF wants to use? You can
make some delineation here about this being your own personal opinion, you
are using your staff email and your title in signature.
[Snip]
editors making 5 or more saves
[is]
down
across Wikipedia generally when comparing August 2015 with 2014.
So, actually, your title is faulty and misleading. Instead, you could
say:
- "English Wikipedia editor numbers continue to decline but meta-editors
are up",
- "Editor diversity falls as more edits are done by fewer editors", or
even
- "Beset by a falling number of editors, existing users of the English
Wikipedia feel compelled to edit still more in their desperate attempts
to
fix things"?
But it's nice to have one metric be positive.
I'm not sure it is. What is the nature and value of these edits? Two
editors endlessly reverting each other counts as "more edits" but adds no
value; one hundred editors each writing a beautiful Featured Article in a
single edit counts as less "work" than one admin reverting 101 vandalism
edits by a single spambot. What's your next step to evaluate this?
None of the part above, or those alternative titles are helpful. Perhaps
you want to look in to this issue and work with WereSpielChequers.
Thanks
Theo
[1]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-September/079054.html