[Wikimedia-l] User retention statistics?

[Robert Rohde]

PS. This story was triggered by Fastily's retirement.  He has 46000
edits on enwiki, and only about 620 editors have reached that plateau.
 Of these, 90% are still active.  So such retirements are relatively
rare.  Personally, I hope he decides to come back after taking some
time to relax and recharge.  It seems to be the case that many such
declared retirements aren't really permanent.

-Robert Rohde

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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