On 10 September 2015 at 07:21, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
A quick follow up to the signpost article of a couple of weeks ago < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-26/In_foc...
We
now have the August figures https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm, and August has continued what we might reasonably start calling the new trend. The English Wikipedia has more editors with 100 or more live edits in mainspace than for any August since 2010. Across all Wikipedias combined the figures are up almost as steeply with a near 10% increase on August 2014, though this doesn't quite get us back to 2012 levels.
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.
[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?
Yours,