Andreas Kolbe, 10/01/2013 19:21:
Focus
on the third and fourth charts with yellow bars.
Random fluctuations aside, the ones for French show a consistent upward
trend.
They don't.
Errata corrige:
Federico Leva (Nemo), 10/01/2013 17:58:
"New editors" is not reliable because one
edit is enough, number of
edits or (new) articles have too much bot noise, database size/words is
often useful but even more often not available for WikiStats performance
limitations.
Ten edits, naturally, not one. One should also take into account when
the "birth date" as new contributor is defined to be.[1]
Still on external factors, it's also fun to play with
http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ , "State of the Internet Data
Visualization" per country.
For instance, several countries seem to have stagnated for years (since
the beginning of the reports) as regards broadband adoption; Japan has a
mysterious drop in 2011 which seems to have an identical drop in active
ja.wiki editors, recovered at the same time in early 2012; Russia has an
explosion which one could think caused TheSeptemberThatNeverEnded that
we're still seeing; France has a big peak in the first half of 2012.
But again, this is just playing, we still know so little.
Actually, I don't even know if WMF is still focussing on (en.wiki)
editor retention or rather on editor recruitment: does someone know?
Nemo
[1] I've added a note about it in the very useful new page on
definitions:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Metric_definitions#Contributor>