Hi Nemo,

Good questions:

I'm trying to work out what the underlying "real" level of editing has been since 2009, not because I think it a good metric, I'm aware that edit count is only a good measure of edit count. But because others are getting concerned about a drop in edit count, and I'd like to try to come up with a less bad metric than raw edit count.

As for your critique of the Article For Creation process " I don't understand. If a page is created in a namespace and moved to ns0, its whole history is counted. If history is not moved, or even worse it is not moved AND the creator is not the author of the content, something stinks. But why would people be doing something which is both wrong and more difficult?" I'm not a fan of that process either, but I'm aware that it does happen on EN wiki, and that it is steering many edits away from mainspace.

Regards

Jonathan

On 28 August 2013 16:45, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:

WereSpielChequers, 28/08/2013 17:14:

Just because the edit filter is enabled by default doesn't mean that

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every wiki has people optimising it to find vandalism in their language.

This is what the bugzilla link is about. :)

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I'm trying to work out what the underlying "real" level of editing has been since 2009.

For what purposes? The following sentence seems to be about something else:

The problem with measuring either unreverted edits or

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edits by active users is that the edit filters don't just lose us a large proportion of the vandalism that we used to get, they also lose us a lot of goodfaith edits that have ceased to be necessary, including the vandalism reversions, warnings and block messages that have been automated away by the edit filter.

The stats at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/**PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htmhttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htmget round part of that by only measuring mainspace edits, so they don't count the warnings and block messages that we've lost. Though they presumably have lost the reversion of vandalism that has now been prevented by the edit filter.

That's fine if we're interested in the editing activity considered as a good thing (rather than in "how much time is wasted doing X").

But measuring article space edits has its own problems - the

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more article creation has shifted to sandboxes in userspace and especially to on EN wiki to WP space as part of Articles for creation, <https://en.wikipedia.org/**wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_** Articles_for_creationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation> the

less meaningful it is to measure the different spaces as if their boundaries were immutable.

I don't understand. If a page is created in a namespace and moved to ns0, its whole history is counted. If history is not moved, or even worse it is not moved AND the creator is not the author of the content, something stinks. But why would people be doing something which is both wrong and more difficult?

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I appreciate that some of these things are difficult to measure, but sometimes it is the difficult stuff that is important.

Yes but if it's important you need to define your goals or you'll never go anywhere.

A case in point

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being the increasing tendency to revert unsourced edits on EN Wiki. The stats you quote treat all reversions the same, so the rise in simply reverting unsourced edits would appear to be more than masked by a combination of the loss of vandalism reversions to the edit filter, and the inreasing speed and sophistication of the vandalfighting bots.

Again, I have no idea how this relates to all the above. Is measuring this specific thing your actual goal? You will never be able to see it in aggregated stats about editing activity, whatever filter or definition you use.

Nemo