On 6/5/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Yes, that would be interesting to know, but what I am thinking of is more like:
When a person becomes "active" (by some definition), how long do they tend to remain "active" (by that same definition).
I would say looking at this in a variety of ways would be useful. Anons pose special problems in interpreting the data, of course, and so probably we won't get much useful information out of those. But since we know that almost all people who are really part of the community get a user account, I suspect that looking at the activity patterns for user accounts would be the most interesting.
I thought of a simple mood metric: the percentage of wikipedians (active for at least two months) who made more edits this month than the previous month. It would be affected by seasons but it might be interesting.
Steve