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

[Anthony]

On 10/10/07, 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.
>
You're probably right about the effects, but I'm not really sure.  The
choice to exclude redirects also would probably have a similar effect,
but again I can't be sure.  And the breakdown of
registered/unregistered and reverted/nonreverted would probably also
be affected.  The conclusion that there has been a decline in edits
recently would almost definitely still apply, but the shape of the
curve would be different, the timing of the decline might be
different, and the mix of edits would probably be different.

4-6 months ago there was a lot of deletion and conversion to redirects
surrounding BLP issues.  For instance, Daniel Brandt's article, which
had around 3000 edits, was converted into a redirect.  But this
article had no chance of being picked by the random selection, because
it was turned into a redirect.

> And such biases would have no impact on the analysis of account creation,
> protections, or blocking.  All of which also show drops.
>
Yes, I think you're right that the activity rate (in the article
space, at least) has been declining.  At the same time the traffic
apparently has been increasing (according to alexa, at least).  What
about the activity rate in the non-article space?