I think the best way to track would be to select a random group of
1000 active editor vets each year (who have been editing for 2+ years
and are thus probably going to be around for at least a year more) and
track their edits during the course of a year, and then based on the
same criteria, the next year make a new random selection, etc.
I would assume that over time, the yearly activities of such a random
group will show some interesting seasonal fluctuations based on the
language (and thus the holidays in the country of origin) of such
editors.
Basing your data on actual usernames that have been somehow vetted to
be active editors and not temporary bot- or project-related would be
easier than just eliminating all bots.
I believe a similar study was done for new contributors, but I don't
know how the selection was done.
2013/7/23, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
I was poking around on
stats.wikimedia.org and
reportcard.wmflabs.org to
see if I could find out how overall editing levels had changed (if any)
over the past year. Unfortunately, it seems that all of our "edits per
month" graphs show all edits, including bot edits. Since changes in bot
editing levels are often dramatic from month to month, this noise
effectively cancels out the usefulness of the graphs. For example, you
can see a huge spike in March when I presume the Wikidata bots were
running at full force:
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/#secondary-graphs-tab
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm#3
My question is: Would it be possible to replace or augment these graphs
with graphs that exclude bot edits? I know that bot status is not stored
in the revision table, so this would be quite expensive to tally. Would
it be prohibitively expensive? Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Ryan Kaldari
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