Message: 2
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2012 15:02:51 -0700
From: Tilman Bayer <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual
Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation
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On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tilman Bayer, 29/07/2012 18:28:
Regarding the "normal levels", I
suppose you haven't yet had a chance
to look at
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors ?
Yes and it shows that there's still an increase over the pre-WLM
situation.
Given the size of the normal monthly fluctuations (e.g. July-August
2011: +0.3K, August-October 2011: +0.2K), and the overall upwards
trend during 2011-12, I find it hard to understand the objections to
the interpretation "returning to normal levels".
Actually I was reading
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm>
which
shows the numbers better but still doesn't
have the total number of
uploaders/ussers with at least one edit in a given month.
It does show the number
of users with at least one upload, and those
with at least one mainspace edit (look further down). As an aside, it
also contains numbers for uploads made using UploadWizard, strongly
supporting the statement that much of the 2011-12 growth was due to
this usability improvement, cf. the statement on slide 25 you already
cited below.
> Also, recently Lodewijk, with the help of WMF data analyst Erik
> Zachte, posted this interesting analysis:
>
>
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/new-editors-thanks-to-wiki-loves-monument…
If I read it correctly, from the newbies among the WLM participants,
61 were still active in May 2012. This compares to altogether 7053
active editors on Commons during that month (the latter number is from
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm ;
note that a user who makes just one edit or one upload during a month
falls below the threshold for the currently used active editors
metric). But as the blog post notes, there are efforts underway to
improve retention of new contributors in this year's WLM.
Thanks, I had indeed missed this post for some reason. 231 or 6,6 % with
some activity after the end and 61 very active editors
That's not quite what
the blog post said. 61 was the number of all
*active* editors left during the latest month examined (May), and it
doesn't say how the average number of edits is distributed among
these. That being said, it's of course absolutely great that WLM
appears to have brought in at least some very active contributors,
among them one who has already done 20,000 edits so far.
seems to be better
than what the university students do?
If "what the university students
do" refers to the Education Program,
note that boosting the number of active editors by those students
isn't its primary goal, and neither has WLM been focused on that
metric.
This is also acknowledged later on, at p. 25:
?[...] multimedia is where
early usability efforts (UploadWizard), especially alongside programs
like
Wiki Loves Monuments, have paid off. (Commons is
one of the few areas
where
active editors are growing -- 25% year over year,
with a spike to 9.37K
from
6.97K in September 2011 due to the WLM
competition.)?.
Again, I'm not quite sure what "This" in "This
is also acknowledged
later on" refers to. See e.g.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spike for
the meaning of "spike".
--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
As Wiki Loves Monuments is an annual competition involving the upload of
photographs in September, I would think we need a couple more Septembers
before we know how successful it is at acquiring a group of additional
regular participants.
However what we already know is that it is pretty successful at getting a
large amount of useful content.
If as a non-participant I could suggest one change it would be to allow
people to upload images at any time of year and submit them to the contest
in September. Aside from the advantages of potentially turning an annual
event into a hobby, there are monuments where we want images of the light
at different times of the year, or that are best seen after the leaves have
fallen.
WSC