[Foundation-l] Analysis of statistics

[Nemo_bis]

Felipe Ortega, 25/07/2009 18:06:
> * The main proportion of Featured Articles in all top-ten language versions needed, at least, more than 1,000 days (3 years) to reach that level.

But I often see that even an old, quiescent page is completely 
re-written or significantly improved by an "expert" (of the matter and 
often of wiki too) user (often FA regulars) to reach Featured article 
status, and it reaches it in some weeks at most.

> * Most of editors contributing to FAs were high experienced editors, meaning more than 2.5 or 3 years participating in Wikipedia. 

I read your thesis entirely, and I have a big concern: you consider only 
number of edits. An admin can edit dozen of thousands of articles 
reverting vandalisms, and histories are full of huge vandalism-revert 
series which are history-noise because that's not where the article was 
improved or acually evolved.
You can often see articles created (or significantly expanded) with a 
single edit followed by dozens or even hunderds of minor edits and 
vandalism-reverts.
Then, we should rather consider, as authors of articles, users who added 
it more text; or better, users who added more of the text which is still 
there (like in wikitrust).
Moreover, FA are only a minority of articles and do not measure the 
quality of the wiki.

Nemo