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

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

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. 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.

> 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 seems to be 
better than what the university students do?
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.)».

Tilman Bayer, 29/07/2012 23:17:
 > Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more
 > thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for
 > example I'm aware of
 > 
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall-2011/
 > . The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar
 > methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about
 > Wikipedia in the academic literature.

Still, even if we consider only quantity, 19 millions characters is not 
that much, and with some guesstimate I'm not sure it's more than what 
some WikiProjects or edit drives have done in the past, e.g. the 
addition of all Italian municipalities on it.wiki back in 2005 or so. 
That passage would have been clearer by excluding all "normal" volunteer 
(individual or organized) activity from the comparison, otherwise it's 
easy to mix things up.

Nemo