[Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[Tilman Bayer]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Philippe Beaudette
<philippe at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org>wrote:
>
>>
>> Add to this the complexity that several barnstars are subst:ed rather
>> than transcluded -- but not all -- and you end up with a completely
>> intractable problem.
>>
>
> Bah humbug.
>
>

Quite a few researchers have published quantitative analyses of barnstars, e.g.:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/July#cite_ref-7
(analyzed 21,299 barnstars awarded to 14,074 editors on the English
Wikipedia)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012/August#Briefly
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2012-04-30#Recognition_may_sustain_user_participation

Yes, some of them could probably have enhanced their datasets by
taking e.g. talk page archiving into account, but I wouldn't rule out
the possibility that they still achieved a good approximation.

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