[Wikimedia-l] [WikiEN-l] "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit", _The Atlantic_

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>wrote:

> There's no great drop in the number of editors:
>
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ENglish_Wikipedia_active_users_%28September_2011%29.png
>


See

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm

Editors making 100+ edits a month in English Wikipedia were at 5,000+ in
early 2007, and are now down to less than 3,500.

German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish core editor numbers are
stable, on the other hand:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaDE.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaFR.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaES.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPT.htm
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaPL.htm

Russian is booming:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaRU.htm

Japanese (another project with a strong popular culture bias) is declining
too:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaJA.htm

Another interesting variable is editor retention, measured as the
percentage of all Wikipedians who still make 100 or more edits a month:

0.45% in English WP
0.59% in Japanese WP
0.73% in Spanish WP
0.90% in German WP*
0.99% in Polish WP*
1.01% in French WP
1.49% in Russian WP*

* The German, Polish and Russian Wikipedias have flagged revisions. (I am
currently looking at this data to see if there is a correlation between
flagged revisions and editor retention.)

Andreas