Aaron Halfaker, 04/01/2013 23:57:

Forgive me, but:

...

1. we already know that users who joined in 2005/2006 are still

disproportionately active in most community processes like deletion discussions and so on,

How disproportionately active *are* the 2005/2006ers and is the problem solving itself or getting worse?

I've no idea of course, I'm not able to produce updates for papers I read (and embarassingly enough, not even to quickly find the paper in question on my hard drive). :-)

...

2. everybody knows that to influence how the wiki is run it's more

effective to change a single word in an important policy than to establish ten new policies.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. It certainly depends on the importance of the single word and the potential ten new policies. Do you know how the influence of policy works and can you prove it?

I don't see why the burden of proof should be on me: you are the one claiming that non-multiplication of policies is a problem, a very novel concept to my mind. I suppose that some useful research could be done on the "verifiability, not truth" motto, which in the end was killed: a big example of NoRespectForHistory I'd say; maybe a nice achievement for the recent editors you'd think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability/2012_RfC

As Oliver stated, there's a big difference between just knowing something and having a good reason to know it. In this paper, we explored quite a few intuitive explanations for the decline and reduced them dramatically. A lot of "known"s became known to be wrong in the process of our analysis (e.g. that the decline was caused by the declining quality of newcomers).

I'd go farther than Oliver though to start we all gain a lot by using data to beat back assumptions that were wrong and supporting those that are right. It's not just academics that are empowered by knowledge based on big data analysis. Both the community and the foundation need to know the scale and trajectory of certain problems in order to prioritize and act effectively. The intuition of individuals is invaluable, no doubt, but it is no substitute for data on important patterns that are difficult to observe.

Again, I never said the contrary.

Nemo