Hang on !

While all these stats highlight the people who make 5+ edits, the real strength of any Wikipedia is people who make 100+, 1000+, 2500+ edits per month. Only those Wikipedias which manage to nurture a continuous supply of such editors can progress while keeping in balance editors who go inactive periodically or forever.

Let's take the case of Tamil Wikipedia.

(Everyone should excuse me quoting Tamil Wikipedia often. It is my home Wikipedia and where have I exclusively worked for many years. I do watch how other Wikipedias work and will try my best to showcase case studies from as many Wikipedias possible. If you know better case studies, please feel free to add to the discussion)

Please check the page

https://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:cms

Since February 2013, we are keeping track of people who make 100+, 250+ and 1000+ edits every month.

So far, in the last 15 months alone, we have

100+ edits - 30 contributors

250+ edits - 41 contributors

1000+ editors - 13 contributors

Many of these people hit these milestones often.

With so many in the pool, the most number of contributors who have made 100+ in a single month is 34 which happened in January 2014.

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

The number of new articles created, daily edits all depend on this most active editor count.

For example, check the distribution of article edits in following three languages

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm#editdistribution

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

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaML.htm#editdistribution

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaTA.htm#editdistribution

Almost universally, the trend of 1-2% editors making 80% of edits is prevalent.

And let us see the kind of effort these people put in.

During May 2012, just for fun, I asked my fellow Tamil Wikipedians this simple question:

https://ta.wikipedia.org/s/qbz

How many hours per week do you spend on activities related to Tamil Wikipedia? (Includes time to collect references)

14 people answered and they collectively spent 294 working hours per week.

Extrapolating for the stats that month, we found that we spend at least 400+ working hours every week collectively improving Tamil Wikipedia.

That is equivalent to employing 10 full time staff just to keep editing Tamil Wikipedia !

And after all this we don't even feel we are anywhere near a very useful and comprehensive encyclopedia. There is lot of work to be done yet.

**

CIS is liberal in throwing lot of jargons at the community. Say for example, Needs assessment, Coordination problem, etc.,

For a difference, I would like to ask them:

* Have you ever done a feasibility study for the chances of having a high quality Wikipedia led by active community before engaging in language community plan? Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas as listed  at

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015#Language_Area_Work_Plans

don't talk about this.

That is why I question the sanity of engaging with incubator projects like Tulu.

* Are your plans creative enough, big enough to capture and nurture the most active contributors? Without such contributors all efforts will remain one-off and inorganic. That is why I question the effectiveness of paid physical outreach you engage so much. Physical outreach by volunteers can be equally ineffective. But it serves other purposes like community leadership building, brand building etc., and not direct editor recruitment.