[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012

[Maryana Pinchuk]

Hi Pine,

Reviving this thread because it looks like your questions haven't been
answered...

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 4:26 PM, ENWP Pine <deyntestiss at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Erik,
>
> Thanks for replying. Let me make sure that I understand. The graph at
> http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors isn’t affected by the
> bug, and we still believe that we have a declining number of new editors
> per month. However, the graphs for the number of active editors may be
> wrong, since edit counts may be wrong. Is this correct?
>
> The bulk of my previous comments would stand even with upward revisions to
> the counts of active editors. WMF is investing multiple staff and what I
> perceive to be a significant amount of financial resources with the goal of
> increasing the number of active editors, and the statistics related to
> these efforts are relevant to the strategic plan. I believe that monthly
> updates would be appropriate and welcome.
>

If you're asking why we haven't hooked our monthly quantitative metrics up
with the work we're doing on editor retention, the answer is that we're in
the process of transitioning from a system where the metrics were generated
by hand to one that's streamlined and automated, which is technically
complex and will take a bit of setup time. The ultimate goal of automation
is being able to do exactly what you're asking, though, so I think it'll be
worth the wait :)

But yes, you're absolutely right -- we need to be sure to include monthly
updates on all our editor engagement related activities. I'm on the newly
formed editor engagement experiments team, and it looks like our activities
for last month were not listed on this report for some reason (probably
because of aforementioned newness). That's a really unfortunate oversight
on our end, and I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. The super-condensed
version: we hired two new team members, prioritized our first group of
experiments, and spec'ed out our first
experiment<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Timestamp_position_modification>for
launch in June. In the meantime, if you or anyone else is interested
in
our work and want to watch it as it unfolds, you can watchlist our
documentation hubs on English
Wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:E3>and/or
Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/E3>.

Of course, there are other engineering teams working on editor engagement,
too -- I don't want to speak for them, but I will say that especially for
things like the visual editor, it's difficult to report easily digestible
monthly progress, since it's a much longer term project. Editor engagement
experiments should have something to report every month, though; that's the
point of rapid iteration! So thank you for pushing us on this, and don't
hesitate to get in touch with me or Steven Walling if you have more
questions.

Best,
Maryana


>
> Thanks,
>
> Pine
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Erik Zachte" <ezachte at wikimedia.org>
> To: "'Wikimedia Mailing List'" <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012
> Message-ID: <004b01cd4cca$1ae54430$50afcc90$@wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> It may well be that the trends are distorted due to major bug in wikistats.
> That bug has been isolated, but we need 7-10 days to regenerate all
> reports.
> See also
> http://infodisiac.com/blog/2012/06/wikistats-editor-counts-are-broken/
>
> Sorry for the confusion and inconvenience.
>
> Erik Zachte
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikimedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of ENWP Pine
> Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2012 9:20 PM
> To: wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012
>
> Tilman,
>
> Thanks for the report.
>
> I would like to suggest that for the foreseeable future (not just for
> June),
> these monthly reports should include a fuller set of updates on the editor
> engagement and retention efforts. My understanding is that this is a high
> priority effort for WMF, it seems to involve a fairly significant number of
> WMF FTEs and LTEs, and I think it is of interest to the global Wikimedia
> community.
>
> Personally I am very concerned about the continuing slide in the number of
> active editors. There are many areas on ENWP where having a few more active
> editors would be very helpful, and I speculate that other projects would
> also appreciate having additional active editors. My concerns are
> illustrated beautifully on some of the graphs here:
> "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/new_editors",
> "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors", and
> "http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors_target".
>
> I would like to hear more about what progress is being made to improve the
> trends. We heard about the Teahouse and new initiatives for Arabic
> Wikipedia, which are very good, and I especially appreciated the detailed
> reports on the Teahouse pilot that were sent to ENWP participants' talk
> pages through "The Tea Leaf" newsletter, including links to
> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Host_lounge/Metrics" and
> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Pilot_report". I also
> appreciated reading about the progress of India communications and
> community
> support. I would like to hear more about what the projected effects of
> these
> initiatives will be on the editor statistics in the global report cards,
> have the projections compared to actuals, and get updates on these
> projections and actuals each month. The amount of staff and financial
> resources that are invested in editor engagement (including development of
> the visual editor), and the importance of the outcomes of those efforts for
> the movement and Wikimedia Strategic Plan priorities, are of significant
> interest to me and I imagine to many other members of the global Wikimedia
> community.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Pine
>
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-- 
Maryana Pinchuk
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org