[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[William Pietri]

On 03/27/2010 09:49 PM, Keegan Paul wrote:
> 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?
>    

I've got two hypotheses, but no data, so I don't know how true these are.

One is that this correlates with Wikipedia's hype curve. The notion is 
that people were most likely to become involved in Wikipedia when it was 
new to them. By now most people have settled in as either readers or 
participants, and are unlikely to change roles.

The other is that this relates to the odds that somebody would arrive on 
a topic and see something that to them obviously needed fixing and that 
they could easily fix right then. This would be a function of increasing 
coverage, increasing article quality, and tightened standards that might 
eliminate things novice editors would find appealing.

These could both be true, as could a number of other things. Like 
Gregory Maxwell, I suspect it's a mix of weak effects.

William