On 6/5/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Turns out we can.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Days_since_first_edit.png
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.
How's that?
But what does it all mean?? Are people staying with the project longer, or are newbies not sticking around?
A couple of possibilities: * If everything remains constant - no newbies, just the same oldbies editing at the same rate, it goes up. * If people edit for a year then never edit again, then it presumably remains flat, at around 150 days. *It would take a seriously strange set of events for that graph to come down (mass exodus of oldbies, and influx of newbies).
Bear in mind that the first year or so of data is a bit suspicious, because it wasn't *possible* for any 2 or 3 year oldbies to be editing. So I don't really see a lot of evolution in this data at all, most closely matching my second hypothesis above - people arive, stick around for (in this case, 2 years [1]), then piss off.
Steve [1] I came up with 2 years by presuming that if the average edit was by a 1 year old, then editors have a lifespan of 2 years before no longer editing. However, I'm not at all sure of my logic, and I can't explain it. :)