[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation

[Tilman Bayer]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:18 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tilman Bayer, 29/07/2012 18:28:
>
>> Regarding the "normal levels", I suppose you haven't yet had a chance
>> to look at http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors ?
>
>
> Yes and it shows that there's still an increase over the pre-WLM situation.
Given the size of the normal monthly fluctuations (e.g. July-August
2011: +0.3K, August-October 2011: +0.2K), and the overall upwards
trend during 2011-12, I find it hard to understand the objections to
the interpretation "returning to normal levels".

> Actually I was reading
> <http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm> which
> shows the numbers better but still doesn't have the total number of
> uploaders/ussers with at least one edit in a given month.
It does show the number of users with at least one upload, and those
with at least one mainspace edit (look further down). As an aside, it
also contains numbers for uploads made using UploadWizard, strongly
supporting the statement that much of the 2011-12 growth was due to
this usability improvement, cf. the statement on slide 25 you already
cited below.
>
>
>> Also, recently Lodewijk, with the help of WMF data analyst Erik
>> Zachte, posted this interesting analysis:
>>
>> http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/new-editors-thanks-to-wiki-loves-monuments/
>>
>> If I read it correctly, from the newbies among the WLM participants,
>> 61 were still active in May 2012. This compares to altogether 7053
>> active editors on Commons during that month (the latter number is from
>> http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikispecial/EN/TablesWikipediaCOMMONS.htm ;
>> note that a user who makes just one edit or one upload during a month
>> falls below the threshold for the currently used active editors
>> metric). But as the blog post notes, there are efforts underway to
>> improve retention of new contributors in this year's WLM.
>
>
> Thanks, I had indeed missed this post for some reason. 231 or 6,6 % with
> some activity after the end and 61 very active editors
That's not quite what the blog post said. 61 was the number of all
*active* editors left during the latest month examined (May), and it
doesn't say how the average number of edits is distributed among
these. That being said, it's of course absolutely great that WLM
appears to have brought in at least some very active contributors,
among them one who has already done 20,000 edits so far.
> seems to be better
> than what the university students do?
If "what the university students do" refers to the Education Program,
note that boosting the number of active editors by those students
isn't its primary goal, and neither has WLM been focused on that
metric.
> This is also acknowledged later on, at p. 25: «[...] multimedia is where
> early usability efforts (UploadWizard), especially alongside programs like
> Wiki Loves Monuments, have paid off. (Commons is one of the few areas where
> active editors are growing -- 25% year over year, with a spike to 9.37K from
> 6.97K in September 2011 due to the WLM competition.)».
Again, I'm not quite sure what "This" in "This is also acknowledged
later on" refers to. See e.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spike for
the meaning of "spike".



-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB