Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Felipe Ortega]

> De: Yaroslav M. Blanter 
> Para: Felipe Ortega ; Research into Wikimedia  
> content and communities 
> CC: 
> Enviado: Jueves 3 de Mayo de 2012 11:48
> Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3  
> fewer
> 
>>  These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I
>>  concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other
>>  languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias.
>> 
>>  The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities
>>  (for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects).
>>  However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core
>>  contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be
>>  probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3
>>  in a group of 20 is a very different story.
>> 
>>  Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive
>>  edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of
>>  this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics
>>  (lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not
>>  unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle 
> periods of
>>  more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is usually
>>  shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 months).
>> 
>>  I mention this because, according to one of the comments on
>> 
>> 
>> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless
>> 
>>  the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim):
>>  "editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this
>>  definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the 
> light
>>  of these results about idle periods.
>> 
>>>  The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less 
> likely to
>>>  leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is clearly
>>>  statistically significant.
>>> 
>>>  The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 
> 20K
>>>  edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
>>> 
>> 
>>  Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits,
>>  I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", 
> since absolute
>>  figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the
>>  performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by
>>  lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime had
>>  better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising
>>  trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a
>>  different purpose...
>> 
>>>  I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we 
> take 10K
>>>  edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable 
> lifetime.
>>>  Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.
>>> 
>>>  So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do 
> not get
>>>  replaced.
>>> 
>> 
>>  In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to
>>  characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily or
>>  permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is
>>  learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got
>>  there, and why now we have fewer people following that path.
>> 
>>  Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for
>>  the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is
>>  important because very active editors are supposed to have much more
>>  experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about
>>  the editing process, about how to interact with other community
>>  members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for
>>  Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior
>>  members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time
>>  experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of
>>  authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more than
>>  3 years (+1,000 days)  in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: also
>>  for most of the middle-size Wikipedias).
>> 
>>  Last, but not least, there is another important connection with
>>  main

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I
concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other
languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias.

The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities
(for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects).
However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core
contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be
probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3
in a group of 20 is a very different story.

Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive
edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of
this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics
(lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not
unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle periods of
more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is 
usually
shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 
months).


I mention this because, according to one of the comments on


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless

the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim):
"editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this
definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the light
of these results about idle periods.

The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much 
less likely to
leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is 
clearly

statistically significant.

The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with 
about 20K

edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.



Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits,
I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", since absolute
figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the
performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by
lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime 
had

better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising
trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a
different purpose...

I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if 
we take 10K
edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable 
lifetime.

Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.

So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they 
do not get

replaced.



In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to
characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily 
or

permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is
learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got
there, and why now we have fewer people following that path.

Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for
the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is
important because very active editors are supposed to have much more
experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about
the editing process, about how to interact with other community
members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for
Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior
members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time
experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of
authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more 
than
3 years (+1,000 days)  in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: 
also

for most of the middle-size Wikipedias).

Last, but not least, there is another important connection with
maintenance activity. Editors with special accounts (e.g. sysops) may
become idle for several days in article editing, but they continue to
perform administrative duties systematically. As a result, the trends
in the number of new admins and RFAs, and number of administrative
changes performed over time should also complement this picture 
(since

many, many admins were not among the most prolific editors when they
were appointed).

Best,
Felipe.



Thanks Felipe. You obviously raise very relevant questions (one more 
would be about blocked users, some of which I clearly recognize as 
inactive editors in the list), but they are subjects of real research 
like yours, not of smth I can do on a coffie-break taking a break from 
my own research (in a completely different field).


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Mateus Nobre]

It seems like a sad projection.

If you allow me to, I would call it ''the editors disenchantment''.

The editors start, paraphrasing the first e-mail, as ''growing cheerful
teenagers''. Then, comes the maturity in the project after a couple years
in.
But the ''adulthood'' isn't a new phase in the Wikipedia, the mature phase,
as it is supposed to be.
It's the end.

We're kept by our bunch of ''teenagers''. Why ''adults'' go away?

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote:

>  The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
>> of the names near the top of this list
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:EDITS[7]
>>  are blue linked which
>>
>> means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
>> editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on
>>
>> my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.
>>
>>
> Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it today.
>
> I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, taking
> numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted as
> inactive, and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them to
> change the trend, and some of them may be inactive as well.
>
> The results first.
>
> Range (numbers) Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive
>
> 1-200   over 93828  32   16
> 201-400 67561-93655 33   16.5
> 401-600 52024-67556 38   19
> 601-800 43587-51942 39   19.5
> 801-100037805-43432 51   20.5
> 1001-1200   33271-37791 61   30.5
> 1201-1400   30256-33260 54   27
> 1401-1600   27593-30250 50   25
> 1601-1800   25364-27571 60   30
> 1801-2000   23682-25360 80   40
> 2001-2500   19699-23574174   34.8
> 2501-3000   17089-19697167   33.4
> 3001-3500   14777-17086191   38.2
> 3501-4000   13049-14777199   39.8
> 4001-4500   11674-13048225   45
> 4501-5000   10495-11673195   39
> 5001-55009570-10495211   42.2
> 5501-60008699-9569 224   44.8
> 6001-65008011-8697 239   47.8
> 6501-70007379-8011 242v  48.4
>
> The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less
> likely to leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is
> clearly statistically significant.
>
> The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about
> 20K edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
>
> I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we
> take 10K edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable
> lifetime. Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.
>
> So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do
> not get replaced.
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>
>
> __**_
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-l
>



-- 
_
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*Freedom, acessibility, autonomy, openess, independence, transparency.
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Steven Walling]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 5:03 AM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written
> what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are
> no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as
> effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed
> and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors
> we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new
> editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has
> dropped far more steeply.


+1.

Maryana Pinchuk and I here at the WMF have recently been looking at English
Wikipedia editors who just made their first 1,000 edits to articles, and
we've hand coded their topics of contribution:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_milestones

It is stunningly obvious to us from observing a couple hundred of these
editors that there is:

A) still *tons* to write about, and editors know it. No one is asking them
to write particular articles, they're just doing it on their own.
B) these editors are not (yet) part of the core governance making community
for the most part

One of the more interesting things is that these editors are mostly
contributing to local culture, sports, media, and history about topics not
related to America, the UK, Australia, etc.

The traditional "core community" that comes from native English-speaking
countries has definitely moved on in focus from creating new articles to
trying to improve and expand on them. So much so that they recently tried
to propose that we don't let new editors create articles until they edit a
little bit (e.g. achieving "autoconfirmed" user rights).

But from looking at this sample of very active contributors to articles, it
is clear that any statement that there is nothing new to write about is
simply a problem of perception, because you're asking people from Western
countries who don't even see that you're missing good articles about every
politician in India, every soccer club in the Bulgaria, every Chinese
composer.

Just as the first ten years of Wikipedia expanded on the Britannica-style
concept of the encyclopedia, the next phase of English content development
appears to be coming from people whose understanding of what an
encyclopedia is goes way beyond covering dead white guys and textbook
concepts.

-- 
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Felipe Ortega]

Hi all.

Thanks for the debate and for sharing your figures and insights. I would like 
to offer some comments on this (below).


- Mensaje original -
> De: Yaroslav M. Blanter 
> Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities 
> 
> CC: 
> Enviado: Miércoles 2 de Mayo de 2012 15:53
> Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 
> fewer
> 
>>  The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
>>  of the names near the top of this list
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS [7] are blue linked which
>>  means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
>>  editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on
>>  my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.
>> 
> 
> Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it today.
> 
> I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, taking 
> numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted as 
> inactive, 
> and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them to change the 
> trend, 
> and some of them may be inactive as well.
> 
> The results first.
> 
> Range (numbers)     Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive
> 
> 1-200               over 93828      32           16
> 201-400             67561-93655     33           16.5
> 401-600             52024-67556     38           19
> 601-800             43587-51942     39           19.5
> 801-1000            37805-43432     51           20.5
> 1001-1200           33271-37791     61           30.5
> 1201-1400           30256-33260     54           27
> 1401-1600           27593-30250     50           25
> 1601-1800           25364-27571     60           30
> 1801-2000           23682-25360     80           40
> 2001-2500           19699-23574    174           34.8
> 2501-3000           17089-19697    167           33.4
> 3001-3500           14777-17086    191           38.2
> 3501-4000           13049-14777    199           39.8
> 4001-4500           11674-13048    225           45
> 4501-5000           10495-11673    195           39
> 5001-5500            9570-10495    211           42.2
> 5501-6000            8699-9569     224           44.8
> 6001-6500            8011-8697     239           47.8
> 6501-7000            7379-8011     242v          48.4
> 

These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I concur with 
Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other languages, specially 
outside the group of large Wikipedias. 

The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities (for 
instance, it has also been studied in open source projects). However, the size 
of the community and the size of the group of core contributions does matter. 
Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be probably assumed by the rest of the 
group, whereas losing the same 3 in a group of 20 is a very different story.

Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive edits) is 
also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of this factor (that is, 
no sampling), against other relevant metrics (lifetime, number of edits or date 
of the first edit). It is not unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to 
have idle periods of more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle 
period is usually shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 
months).

I mention this because, according to one of the comments on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless

the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim): "editors with 
more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this definition of "inactive 
editor" at least questionable under the light of these results about idle 
periods.

> The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less likely 
> to 
> leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is clearly 
> statistically significant.
> 
> The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 20K 
> edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.
> 

Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits, I would 
report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", since absolute figures in the 
table are actually meaningful just relative to the performance of other 
editors. I would also try to normalize edits by lifetime, to compensate the 
fact that editors with longer lifetime had better chances to make more edits 
(which may hide fast-raising trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a 
different table for a different p

Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most
of the names near the top of this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS [7] are blue linked 
which

means they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of
editor whod made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and 
on

my projections there will be over 200 by the end of the year.



Now, I wanted to do it sometime, but your mail motivated me to do it 
today.


I counted the number of inactive users per number of contributions, 
taking numbers from the first 7000 in the list. Placeholders are counted 
as inactive, and this is a clear drawback, but there are too few of them 
to change the trend, and some of them may be inactive as well.


The results first.

Range (numbers) Range (edits)  #inactive  % inactive

1-200   over 93828  32   16
201-400 67561-93655 33   16.5
401-600 52024-67556 38   19
601-800 43587-51942 39   19.5
801-100037805-43432 51   20.5
1001-1200   33271-37791 61   30.5
1201-1400   30256-33260 54   27
1401-1600   27593-30250 50   25
1601-1800   25364-27571 60   30
1801-2000   23682-25360 80   40
2001-2500   19699-23574174   34.8
2501-3000   17089-19697167   33.4
3001-3500   14777-17086191   38.2
3501-4000   13049-14777199   39.8
4001-4500   11674-13048225   45
4501-5000   10495-11673195   39
5001-55009570-10495211   42.2
5501-60008699-9569 224   44.8
6001-65008011-8697 239   47.8
6501-70007379-8011 242v  48.4

The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less 
likely to leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This 
is clearly statistically significant.


The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about 
20K edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is.


I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we 
take 10K edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most 
probable lifetime. Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers.


So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do 
not get replaced.


Cheers
Yaroslav

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[WereSpielChequers]

Those figures are specifically about the English Wikipedia. But the issue
is wider than that.

Comparing Feb 2008 and Feb 2012 for the whole of Wikipedia in all languages
there has been a 10% fall in the number of editors contributing over 100
edits a month. http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm As some
language communities grew in that era and English declined rather more I
think that non-English as a whole was stable.

The problem isn't necessarily that people are finding that they've written
what they know. On EN wiki and I believe the other large communities we are
no longer recruiting editors into the core of very active editors as
effectively as we used to. The community appears to be coming more closed
and though we are only losing a small proportion of our very active editors
we are failing to recruit their replacements. I.e. the numbers of new
editors have dropped somewhat, but the number of new editors who stay has
dropped far more steeply.

The very active are in the vast majority of cases still active - most of
the names near the top of this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:EDITS are blue linked which means
they have edited recently. Earlier this year the number of editor who'd
made over 100,000 edits on En Wiki grew to over 150 and on my projections
there will be over 200 by the end of the year.

This was a big issue of concern a year or so back and is one of the major
foci of Foundation investment. Hopefully one of the changes, more welcoming
templates, a WYSIWYG editor Wikipedia Zero will do the trick and restore
community health. The rate of decline has apparently bottomed out, but we
do have an ageing volunteer base that is getting top heavy in terms of
experience and I suspect age.  The greying of the pedia is going to be one
of our big challenges in the next few years.

I'm pretty sure this isn't a lack of content to add, if anything what we
are seeing is that vandalism is harder to find as the edit filters prevent
it in the first place, and we are running out of typos to fix.

WSC

On 2 May 2012 09:50, Gerard Meijssen  wrote:

> Hoi,
> I take it this is only about the English Wikipedia...
> Thanks,
>  GerardM
>
>
> On 2 May 2012 10:43, Richard Jensen  wrote:
>
>> the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now
>> than in 2007
>>
>> Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
>> Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190
>>
>> Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
>> Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074
>>
>> I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to write
>> about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not a
>> fast-growing teenager any more. 
>>
>>
>>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I take it this is only about the English Wikipedia...
Thanks,
 GerardM

On 2 May 2012 10:43, Richard Jensen  wrote:

> the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now than
> in 2007
>
> Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
> Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190
>
> Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
> Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074
>
> I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to write
> about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not a
> fast-growing teenager any more. 
>
>
>
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer

[Richard Jensen]

the pool of highly active editors is making one-third fewer edits now 
than in 2007


Wikipedians who contributed 100 times or more in this month
Mar 20123429  down 34%   from Mar 2007 = 5190   

Wikipedians who contributed 5 times or more in this month
Mar 201234,372  down 36% from Mar 2007 = 54,074 

I think the once-active editors are running out of new things to 
write about. That is a sign of maturity, I suggest. Wikipedia is not 
a fast-growing teenager any more. 




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