2013/1/22 sankarshan <foss.mailinglists@gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Arjuna Rao Chavala
<arjunaraoc@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

> Please check out my blogpost on Indian Wikipedia languages status in 2012
> and priorities
> http://blog.wikimedia.in/2013/01/22/analysis-of-indian-language-wikipedias-for-2012/

You write "As each one of us intuitively understand that number of
page views and number of edits are correlated, I derived a metric
called ‘Activity’ as their product" - would it be possible for you to
explain why arriving at a product of these two factors is a measure of
activity ?

Both are key measures of activity for the outcome of Wikipedia, that is sharing the sum of human knowledge. If there are not many page views resulting from less number of readers, there will be less enthusiasm on the part of Editors to contribute. If there are more page views, more people will be interested to become Editors. Given the nature of these metrics and different ranges, each one will not be a reliable measure by itself as it is the interaction in the Wikipedia eco-system that will be a more appropriate measure. I also heard during some of wiki interactions that when Chinese language wikipedia was banned in China, the number of editors fell a lot.

Note that I have considered overall database edits in the metric, which also includes the edits that could be made through bots. Bots can be used to improve the quality of Wikipedia by correcting for spelling mistakes apart from less useful interwiki links. By one estimate, bots are said to be contributing to 10% to 30% of edits in top ranked language wikipedias.[1]

Cheers
Arjuna

[1] THE LIVES OF BOTS-R. STUART GEIGER in Critical Point of View-A wikipedia reader", Page 78
Simple statistics indicate the growing influence of algorithmic actors on the editorial process:in terms of the raw number of edits to the English-language version of Wikipedia, automated bots are 17 of the top 20 most prolific editors 2 and collectively make about 16% of all edits to the encyclopedia project. 3 On other major language versions of the project, the percentage of edits made by bots ranges from around 10% (Japanese) to 30% (French).

--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>

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