[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[Keegan Paul]

Oh yeah, the Account Creation proccess, article upload wizard, and commons
image uploading process has some effect as well.  In optimizing one or a few
times contributions, we perhaps also do not pique interest in further
content creation.  On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't have even tried
before.  I move to the former, based on the stats.

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Keegan Paul <kgnpaul at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 12:49 AM, Keegan Paul <kgnpaul at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
>> >
>> > <http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm>It's obvious of
>> the
>> > peak in January of 2007.
>> >
>> > What I'm interested in is thoughts of why New Contributors has
>> statistically
>> > declined sharply, but the list of active contributors has much less of a
>> > slope and even less so for very active contributors.
>> >
>> > What happened in the first six months of 2007?  Did we change template
>> > systems?  Did we reword some policies relating to new users?
>>
>> Careful not to mistake a decline in the derivative of a function to be
>> a decline in the function. The number of new contributors _must_
>> decline at some point, unless you hold a hypothesis that Wikipedia
>> will eventually be driving the growth of human population. ;)
>>
>> The step function in December 2005 is clearly due to
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy#Wikimedia_Foundation_reaction
>>
>> The only thing I recall happening around June 2007 was the
>> introduction of a real captcha.  Might be relevant if a non-trivial
>> amount of the new accounts were spambot sleepers!
>>
>> I don't recall how those stats are generated. If they are produced
>> from the public data then there will be odd distortions due to
>> deletions hiding accounts..
>>
>> I think there were also changes to the upload procedure around that
>> time (the interface language abuse for an upload wizard) which started
>> directing users to commons to upload... and uploading is a primary
>> reason to create an account.   This seems to be at least weakly
>> supported by the stats on commons:
>> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaCOMMONS.htm
>>
>> I'd guess that like most things its probably a mixture of weak effects.
>>
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>
> Oh sure, figures lie and liars figure.  Like stereotypes, from a broad
> lens, they make sense.
>
> I think captcha probably had a good deal to do with it.  Good point there
> to mention.  The systemization of procedures is a good point as well,
> whether it be uploading or bot-assisted and the functionality of automated
> tools like huggle and twinkle.
>
> With these thoughts in mind, the good thing is that the standard userbase
> numbers are consistent.
>
> Thanks Greg, other thoughts?
>
> ~Keegan
> --
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
>



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