On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru> wrote:
<snip>
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?
For enwiki, using data from last August:
28243 users have at least 1000 edits (all namespaces).
Of these, 9898 had not edited in the six months before the end of the data set.
So about 65% of the major editors are still active, at least occasionally.
The mean wiki-lifetime for the 28243 major users was 49.9 months.
For the 9898 users who were not recently active, the mean
wiki-lifetime was 35.6 months.
Further, there are 4685 users with at least 10000 edits, and of these,
all but 914 were still active in the last 6 months of the data set.
So 80% of the editors at the very high end are still active (at least
occasionally). The mean wiki-lifetime on the total group is 60.5
months, and the departed group is 42.6 months.
Incidentally, the mean account age of individuals editing article
space is now over 3 years for enwiki. A lot of the work is being by
the relative old-timers. By the same token though, people who have
ever made it to 1000 edits are more likely than not to still be active
today.
-Robert Rohde