Thanks for posting the data, I replotted it as a set of four superimposed lines and here's my interpretation:
*Overall not much has changed between 2002 and now. Obviously now we have a "longer tail" but other than that the curves are very similar *2003 was a very un-newbie year. It had the sharpest dip in newbie contributions and a strong middle section (300-700 days) *2004 was more newbieish than 2005 - more contributions < 300 days, less < 700 days, and about the same afterwards.
In fact, breaking age ranges up from 0-300, 300-700 and 700+ (just because that's what the data shows), the years rank as follows (most contributions to least contributions): 0-300: 2002, 2004, 2005, 2003 300-700: 2003, 2005, 2004, 2002 700+: 2004, 2005, 2003, 2002
But I'm not really finding any major conclusions leaping out. It would be silly to talk of "drop off in newbie participation" because all these figures are proportional, not absolute.
Just for interest, here are the percentage contributions for 2005 divided into blocks of 100 days. Read the column on the left as "People with up to X days"
100 27.43 200 18.40 300 15.01 400 12.50 500 8.76 600 6.16 700 4.09 800 3.69 900 2.31 1000 1.64
I think someone else pointed out the medians, but just to double check, they are: 2002: 150 2003: 240 2004: 180 2005: 220
I calculated these semi-manually and it's quite possible my method was wonky. Basically, I tried to find the figure where half the occurrences were from younger editors, and half were older editors. No guarantees.
Steve
On 6/5/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
I wrote:
Average was easiest, so I did that as a first try. It shows an initial upward trend, stabilising in early 2005 at about 300 days.
Here's a histogram series for the same data in the form of an animated GIF. It shows the distribution of editor age, averaged over a whole year, for years 2002-2005.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Days_since_first_edit_histogram.gif
-- Tim Starling
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