Here are some charts which breakdown edits into several categories, reverts are counted
separately. Of course edits is not editors, but it could be indicative of changed behavior
patterns/policies. In the ongoing reassesment of metric definitions one thing discussed is
whether we should count productive editors separately (I think we do), and if so on what
basis (e.g. x edits per week/month which survived y days of not being reverted).
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm
Erik
-----Original Message-----
From: wikimedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Mark
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 23:03
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users
On 1/14/14, 5:56 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 14/01/14 15:38, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
On 01/13/2014 11:20 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
The English
Wikipedia edit rate has been declining since about January 2007, and
is now only 67% of the rate at that time. A linear regression on the
edit rate from that time predicts death of the project at around 2030.
That's... come /on/ Tim! You know better than to say silly things
like that.
The abuse filter alone could very well account for this (the
prevented edits and the revert that would have taken place). :-) I
used to do a lot of patrol back in those years and - for nostalgia's
sake - I tried doing a bit over a year ago. The amount of "surface"
vandalism has gone down a *lot* since.
Reversing the decline in editor population
has been a major strategic
priority of WMF for many years. You are saying you have never heard of
it before? Well, here is some reading material for you:
I have heard much about the strategic priority, but much less about the rigorous data
analysis. In particular, I have yet to see a demonstration that there is actually a
decline in what we might call the "productive editor" population, people adding
things to articles or otherwise improving them. Instead what's usually quoted are raw
counts, things like "number of accounts that have made >5 edits in a month".
But of course this kind of "blind quantitative" analysis is not a legitimate
social-science methodology, at least not if some extremely strong ceteris-paribus
assumptions are first validated.
To just pick one hypothesized confound among many that have been discussed on and off,
there may have been a decline in the joint population of "vandals +
vandal-fighters". These are counted as editors by the ">5 edits"
criterion, but between them produce no net editing, so a decline in their joint population
is not a real editor decline, and an increase in their joint population is not a real
editor increase.
Another hypothesized confound is that there has been a wholesale replacement of
"recent changes patrollers" with bots. A loss of net-95 editors because 100
people who solely did recent-changes patrol were replaced by 5 bots that do the same job
would be a decline of 95 raw-data editors, but not really a net loss in productive
editors.
These confounds might, in the end, not account for much after all. But I have been looking
and haven't found even an attempt to *really* substantiate claims that the number of
actual encyclopedia editors has declined, versus just superficial quantitative analysis of
the accounts-making-edits raw data.
Best,
Mark
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