On 10/10/2007, Robert Rohde rarohde@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.