On 10/10/2007, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)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.