[Wikimedia-l] User retention statistics?

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
<snip>

> 1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one
> with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am
> pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on
> the number of contributions?

For enwiki, using data from last August:

28243 users have at least 1000 edits (all namespaces).

Of these, 9898 had not edited in the six months before the end of the data set.

So about 65% of the major editors are still active, at least occasionally.

The mean wiki-lifetime for the 28243 major users was 49.9 months.

For the 9898 users who were not recently active, the mean
wiki-lifetime was 35.6 months.


Further, there are 4685 users with at least 10000 edits, and of these,
all but 914 were still active in the last 6 months of the data set.
So 80% of the editors at the very high end are still active (at least
occasionally).  The mean wiki-lifetime on the total group is 60.5
months, and the departed group is 42.6 months.


Incidentally, the mean account age of individuals editing article
space is now over 3 years for enwiki.  A lot of the work is being by
the relative old-timers.  By the same token though, people who have
ever made it to 1000 edits are more likely than not to still be active
today.

-Robert Rohde