Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wiki-research-l] Community health (retitled thread)

Yes, but may I also point out that one of our biggest problems on EN wiki is that even good faith newbies will often have their edits reverted. If you add uncited facts to a page you are now much more likely to have your edit reverted than to have someone add <citation needed> so I would suggest a metric that includes persistence v reversion of edits that are not vandalism. Another issue worth measuring is the number of edit conflicts and the frequency that having an edit conflict triggers a newbies departure. This would require WMF help as I don't think that edit conflicts are publicly logged. But some research on this might resolve the divide between those who consider this a minor issue deserving only the lowest priority at bugzilla, and those such as myself who suspect this is one of the most toxic features of the pedia and reducing edit conflicts the easiest major improvement that could be made. By contrast commons is a relatively lonely place. From my experience you can do hundreds of thousands of edits there without ever needing to archive your talkpage. It would be interesting to see some community health metrics that looked at how many interactions people have with other editors, whether thanks or talkpage messages. My suspicion is that editor retention will vary by interaction level, and there will be a sweet spot which is best for retention, above this interaction level some people finding things distracting, and below this level people leave because they feel ignored. Another metric, and probably one best derived from polling organisations who survey the general public would be to identify how many of our readers would fix an error if they spotted it. One of the arguments that our perceived decline in editor recruitment is a cost of quality is the theory that readers who are willing to fix obvious errors are finding fewer errors per hour of reading Wikipedia. I know that casual readers are less likely to spot typos and vandalism than they were a few years ago, but I'm not sure the best way to measure this phenomenon Regards Jonathan Cardy