[Wikimedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Editor retention

[Andrew Gray]

On 4 September 2012 21:01, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532431335938862.html
> September 2011
>
>> Adding more editors “is one of our top priorities for the year,” says Howie Fung…aims to increase the number of editors across all languages of Wikipedia to 95,000 from 81,450 by June of next year.
>
> From http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm using the >5
> edits a month metric used in WMF docs:
>
> 1. July 2012: 76,400
> 2. June 2012: 74,402
> 3. May 2012: 76,956
> 4. April 2012: 75,141
> 5. March 2012; 76,274
>
> The high water mark, incidentally, seems to have been March 2007 with
> 90,618 editors >5 edits that month. So we have been shrinking ~2.8k
> editors a year  ((91 - 77) / (2012 - 2007)). In retrospect, my 75%
> prediction that this priority would not be achieved
> (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/3241) was ludicrously
> optimistic, given that the 95k editor mark has *never* been reached.


I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still
in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the
numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted
downwards by around 5% -
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/

The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based
on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures
for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting
his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long
way to go, though, whichever you use!

I've quickly graphed the recent numbers (just focusing on the period
after the initial exponential growth, so starting in 2007):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated.svg

It seems that the rate of decline may be slowing, at least. Which I
guess is something.

The really interesting part comes from separating out the data for the
English Wikipedia, which is 30% down from its 2007 peak, down from
50,000 editors to 35,000 - the graph is smoother, but otherwise looks
very similar to the first one.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated_-_English_only.svg

In fact, the decline on en.wp is so steep that it actually represents
almost all the overall decline in the projects; if you look at the
totals for every project except en.wp, the graph jumps around a bit
but is actually quite stable. Since the start of 2008, the three-month
moving average has always been 40,000 editors +- 5%.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated_-_Non-English_Wikipedias_only.svg

One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp
event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea
as to the likely cause of this.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk