Tilman Bayer, 29/07/2012 18:28:
Regarding the "normal levels", I suppose you haven't yet had a chance to look at http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors ?
Yes and it shows that there's still an increase over the pre-WLM situation. Actually I was reading http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm which shows the numbers better but still doesn't have the total number of uploaders/ussers with at least one edit in a given month.
Also, recently Lodewijk, with the help of WMF data analyst Erik Zachte, posted this interesting analysis: http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/new-editors-thanks-to-wiki-loves-monuments...
If I read it correctly, from the newbies among the WLM participants, 61 were still active in May 2012. This compares to altogether 7053 active editors on Commons during that month (the latter number is from http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm ; note that a user who makes just one edit or one upload during a month falls below the threshold for the currently used active editors metric). But as the blog post notes, there are efforts underway to improve retention of new contributors in this year's WLM.
Thanks, I had indeed missed this post for some reason. 231 or 6,6 % with some activity after the end and 61 very active editors seems to be better than what the university students do? This is also acknowledged later on, at p. 25: «[...] multimedia is where early usability efforts (UploadWizard), especially alongside programs like Wiki Loves Monuments, have paid off. (Commons is one of the few areas where active editors are growing -- 25% year over year, with a spike to 9.37K from 6.97K in September 2011 due to the WLM competition.)».
Tilman Bayer, 29/07/2012 23:17:
Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for example I'm aware of
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall...
. The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about Wikipedia in the academic literature.
Still, even if we consider only quantity, 19 millions characters is not that much, and with some guesstimate I'm not sure it's more than what some WikiProjects or edit drives have done in the past, e.g. the addition of all Italian municipalities on it.wiki back in 2005 or so. That passage would have been clearer by excluding all "normal" volunteer (individual or organized) activity from the comparison, otherwise it's easy to mix things up.
Nemo