[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Sarah]

> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 17:27, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble
>> successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the
>> English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a
>> year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new
>> editors were still active a year after their first edit."
>>
>> A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts
>> after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new
>> identities, sometimes multiple ones.

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 19:17, Jon Davis <wiki at konsoletek.com> wrote:
> Wouldn't someone leaving & returning as a new username be a loss of 1 and a
> gain of 1? Thereby being a net change of zero?

The conclusion of the study is that losses after one year were more
likely to happen after 2007. That could be (and almost certainly is)
because a higher proportion of accounts created after 2007 were second
accounts, which were then abandoned for third accounts, or to return
to the first one.

> I'm sure there is some username churn in the stats, but I'd be surprised if
> it was a significant portion (more than 1%) of tens of thousands of users.
>
> -Jon
>
I would dispute that, Jon, based on experience. That's why it would be
helpful to make some effort to identify how many people we're talking
about, as opposed to user names.

Sarah