On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 2:21 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.comwrote:

...

There's no great drop in the number of editors:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ENglish_Wikipedia_active_users_%28Sep...

See

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm

Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500.

German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are stable, on the other hand:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPT.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPL.htm

Russian is booming:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaRU.htm

Japanese (another project with a strong popular culture bias) is declining too:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaJA.htm

Another interesting variable is editor retention, measured as the percentage of all Wikipedians who still make 100 or more edits a month:

0.45% in English WP 0.59% in Japanese WP 0.73% in Spanish WP 0.90% in German WP* 0.99% in Polish WP* 1.01% in French WP 1.49% in Russian WP*

• The German, Polish and Russian Wikipedias have flagged revisions. (I am

currently looking at this data to see if there is a correlation between flagged revisions and editor retention.)

Andreas

I forgot to add the editor retention figure in Portuguese WP: it's 0.62%, based on the latest reported month (April 2012).