On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Philippe Beaudette philippe@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.orgwrote:
Add to this the complexity that several barnstars are subst:ed rather than transcluded -- but not all -- and you end up with a completely intractable problem.
Bah humbug.
Quite a few researchers have published quantitative analyses of barnstars, e.g.:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/July#cite_ref-7 (analyzed 21,299 barnstars awarded to 14,074 editors on the English Wikipedia) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/August#Briefly https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012-04-30#Recognition_m...
Yes, some of them could probably have enhanced their datasets by taking e.g. talk page archiving into account, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they still achieved a good approximation.