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Chad Perrin wrote:
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:52:42PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially.
How about when bots are excluded? Just RamBot is a non-negligible proportion of the total edits on en:, and obviously what bots do isn't really a good measure of the social aspects of how humans edit Wikipedia...
Why not? Bots are part of what humans do. I agree that they need to be counted separately for many metrics when making statistical analyses of the social interactions on Wikipedia, but they are a social phenomena in that they are created, targeted, and enacted by humans as a result of their desires and needs within the larger social circumstances of the Wikipedia project as a whole.
I think bots *are* important - look at the impact RamBot has had, with the "Free the RamBot articles" project.
(Whoever replies next should snip some of the quoted stuff :))
- -- Alphax GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis