[WikiEN-l] The Statistical Decline of the English Wikipedia Community

[Robert Rohde]

I would expect the survivorship bias goes in the wrong direction though.
Presumably pages that will be deleted, but haven't yet been, are more likely
to be young.  Hence the not-yet-deleted pages would seem to want to make
recent edit counts higher.  I can't think of any reason why survivorship
effects would lead to a bump 6+ months ago.

And such biases would have no impact on the analysis of account creation,
protections, or blocking.  All of which also show drops.

-Robert

On 10/10/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 10/10/07, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The editing sample is based on a random number generator selection of
> > articles (namespace=0, page_is_redirect is false) in the September 8th
> dump
> > of the page table.  So it excludes articles created in the last weeks of
> > September, but is otherwise a random sample of everything in article
> space.
> >
> As I alluded to before, though, there's a sort of [[survivorship
> bias]] in the fact that any articles deleted before September 8 are
> excluded from the sample.
>
> And since you're not including redirects, there's also a (potentially
> large) bias against articles which were heavily edited in the past and
> then later turned into redirects.
>
> Off the top of my head I can't think of any other significant problems.
>
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