[Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Erik,

Thanks for the charts,

The pattern though not the quantity of declining reverts since the 2007
peak certainly fits the theory that as the anti vandal bots and edit
filters have got more efficient so our level of vandalism has fallen. As
well as the theory that the drift to mobile is turning us from an
interactive medium to a broadcast one. But I don't buy the idea that
reverts are less than 1% of mainspace edits. Looking at a few random
screens of recent changes in recent days I always see at least 1 revert in
far fewer than a hundred mainspace edits. Is it possible that your stats
are only picking a subset of them such as not including reverts by bots, or
those that using undo rather than rollback?

One of the changes in EN Wikipedia has been the increase in non-mainspace
article edits, in particular the promotion of Articles for Creation and in
future the draft namespace as places for creating new articles. Also
userspace, when I train newbies I always advise them to start new articles
in sandboxes rather than run the gauntlets of NPP or AFC, I doubt I'm the
only one who does this. Am  I correct in assuming that these statistics
look at edits according to their namepace at the time when the statistics
run? If so it would be more accurate if we could include articles for
creation within mainspace. Otherwise one of the skews that will be in the
data will be the extent to which we steer new article creators towards AFC,
and of course the stats at any one moment in time will be skewed towards
some very recent edits being in AFC or sandboxes, whilst the same edits
from earlier months will now count in mainspace.

It would also be good to know whether these are surviving edits or total
edits. We have a very large number of articles deleted on the English
language wikipedia every day, and the de facto standards for deletion are
probably rather more deletionist than in 2007. The only big policy change I
can remember that effects this is the decision to make unreferenced new
BLPs a 7 day deletion criteria, but if these are surviving edits as opposed
to raw ones then one of the factors in the change will be the extent of
deletionism

PS I really like the way those charts show the bot spike in early 2013 when
the intrawikis moved to Wikidata

Regards

Jonathan

>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 23:07:08 +0100
> From: Mark <delirium at hackish.org>
> To: wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thanking anonymous users
> Message-ID: <52D9A98C.8070201 at hackish.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> On 1/17/14, 3:55 AM, Erik Zachte wrote:
> > Here are some charts which breakdown edits into several categories,
> reverts are counted separately. Of course edits is not editors, but it
> could be indicative of changed behavior patterns/policies. In the ongoing
> reassesment of metric definitions one thing discussed is whether we should
> count productive editors separately (I think we do), and if so on what
> basis (e.g. x edits per week/month which survived y days of not being
> reverted).
> >
> > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryAll.htm
> >
>
>