Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer
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 pute...@mccme.ruwrote: 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:EDITShttp://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.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- _ *M*ateus*N*obre Free knowledge, free software, free culture, open data. *Freedom, acessibility, autonomy, openess, independence, transparency. That's our way.* *And yours?* +55 (84) 8896 - 1628 ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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 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 ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer
De: Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru Para: Felipe Ortega glimmer_phoe...@yahoo.es; Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org 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 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
Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer
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. ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer
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 pute...@mccme.ru Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org 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 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
Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 fewer
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/ ___ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
