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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 10/10/2007, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

If the deletion rate has remained constant (as a proportion of
articles), then you're absolutely right. If it's changed, then that
could introduce a more complicated bias than just overestimating the
recent edit counts.