Hi Pine,
Reviving this thread because it looks like your questions haven't been answered...
On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 4:26 PM, ENWP Pine deyntestiss@hotmail.com wrote:
Erik,
Thanks for replying. Let me make sure that I understand. The graph at http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors isn’t affected by the bug, and we still believe that we have a declining number of new editors per month. However, the graphs for the number of active editors may be wrong, since edit counts may be wrong. Is this correct?
The bulk of my previous comments would stand even with upward revisions to the counts of active editors. WMF is investing multiple staff and what I perceive to be a significant amount of financial resources with the goal of increasing the number of active editors, and the statistics related to these efforts are relevant to the strategic plan. I believe that monthly updates would be appropriate and welcome.
If you're asking why we haven't hooked our monthly quantitative metrics up with the work we're doing on editor retention, the answer is that we're in the process of transitioning from a system where the metrics were generated by hand to one that's streamlined and automated, which is technically complex and will take a bit of setup time. The ultimate goal of automation is being able to do exactly what you're asking, though, so I think it'll be worth the wait :)
But yes, you're absolutely right -- we need to be sure to include monthly updates on all our editor engagement related activities. I'm on the newly formed editor engagement experiments team, and it looks like our activities for last month were not listed on this report for some reason (probably because of aforementioned newness). That's a really unfortunate oversight on our end, and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. The super-condensed version: we hired two new team members, prioritized our first group of experiments, and spec'ed out our first experimenthttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Timestamp_position_modificationfor launch in June. In the meantime, if you or anyone else is interested in our work and want to watch it as it unfolds, you can watchlist our documentation hubs on English Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:E3and/or Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/E3.
Of course, there are other engineering teams working on editor engagement, too -- I don't want to speak for them, but I will say that especially for things like the visual editor, it's difficult to report easily digestible monthly progress, since it's a much longer term project. Editor engagement experiments should have something to report every month, though; that's the point of rapid iteration! So thank you for pushing us on this, and don't hesitate to get in touch with me or Steven Walling if you have more questions.
Best, Maryana
Thanks,
Pine
-----Original Message----- From: "Erik Zachte" ezachte@wikimedia.org To: "'Wikimedia Mailing List'" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012 Message-ID: 004b01cd4cca$1ae54430$50afcc90$@wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
It may well be that the trends are distorted due to major bug in wikistats. That bug has been isolated, but we need 7-10 days to regenerate all reports. See also http://infodisiac.com/blog/2012/06/wikistats-editor-counts-are-broken/
Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience.
Erik Zachte
-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ENWP Pine Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2012 9:20 PM To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012
Tilman,
Thanks for the report.
I would like to suggest that for the foreseeable future (not just for June), these monthly reports should include a fuller set of updates on the editor engagement and retention efforts. My understanding is that this is a high priority effort for WMF, it seems to involve a fairly significant number of WMF FTEs and LTEs, and I think it is of interest to the global Wikimedia community.
Personally I am very concerned about the continuing slide in the number of active editors. There are many areas on ENWP where having a few more active editors would be very helpful, and I speculate that other projects would also appreciate having additional active editors. My concerns are illustrated beautifully on some of the graphs here: "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors", "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors", and "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors_target".
I would like to hear more about what progress is being made to improve the trends. We heard about the Teahouse and new initiatives for Arabic Wikipedia, which are very good, and I especially appreciated the detailed reports on the Teahouse pilot that were sent to ENWP participants' talk pages through "The Tea Leaf" newsletter, including links to "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host_lounge/Metrics" and "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Pilot_report". I also appreciated reading about the progress of India communications and community support. I would like to hear more about what the projected effects of these initiatives will be on the editor statistics in the global report cards, have the projections compared to actuals, and get updates on these projections and actuals each month. The amount of staff and financial resources that are invested in editor engagement (including development of the visual editor), and the importance of the outcomes of those efforts for the movement and Wikimedia Strategic Plan priorities, are of significant interest to me and I imagine to many other members of the global Wikimedia community.
Thank you,
Pine
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