Hi Piotr,
You might make the assumption that the difference between 4 million
and 16 million is largely editors who never get out of userspace, my
experience is that such users are relatively rare, or at least won't
dominate that 12 million.
I'm fairly sure that there will be a number of different groups in
that 12 million. Steve Walling, Aaron or Maryana may be able to help
analyse or at least explain them.
Significant groups in the 12 million will definitely include:
1 People who registered an account and tried but never successfully
saved an edit because when they looked they saw a wall of code and
they don't do html. The WMF is investing a lot of money in WYSIWYG
editing software in the hope that this will enable goodfaith but not
very technical people to edit Wikipedia.
2 Vandals since 2007. We have edit filters that are trying to
dissuade vandals from saving their first edit because it triggers
one of our tests for probably being vandalism. These filters only
came in during the last few years and have been improved over time -
so they are deterring a significant proportion of recent badfaith
editors from ever saving an edit.
3 Visitors from other wikis. One of the features of Single User Login
is that if you are logged in and you click on a link that takes you
to another wikimedia wiki, your account becomes active at that wiki
even if you never go near the edit button. My account is active on 92
wikis and I've edited in rather less than half of them. I won't go
into all the reasons why one might visit other wikis, but if you see
that an article you've written has equivalents in several other
languages I consider it human nature to click on the links and look
at the article. Even if you don't use Google translate, the choice of
image and the size of the paragraphs is often enough to tell you
whether someone has translated your work or started afresh.
4 Editors whose articles have been deleted. About a quarter of new
editors start by creating a new article rather than by editing
existing articles. A large majority of such articles get deleted and
their authors depart. If the 4 million is only measured on surviving
edits to article space then there will be many hundreds of thousands
whose only article space edits have been deleted.
5 Zombie accounts. We now have programs that prevent people opening
accounts that are overly similar to the names of existing editors,
but before these filters came in many editors would protect
themselves from such impersonation by creating such "zombie
accounts" themselves and marking their userpage with a link to their
main account.
6 Edit conflicts. Breaking news stories attract editors like moths to
flames, our article on Sarah Palin peaked at 25 edits per minute at
one point during the day she became John McCain's running mate (I
don't think anyone logs the number of edit conflicts). If you are a
newbie trying to edit a trending article by using that edit button on
the top of the page then you are guaranteed to get frustrated and
leave. The regulars have learned that busy pages are best edited one
section at a time, and on a very busy page there simply isn't time to
edit the whole page before a section edit is saved. Of course that
could be easily resolved by disabling whole page editing on busy
pages, but I'm not expecting that anytime soon.
Another issue is that I believe that the 4 million are people who
have one undeleted edit to mainspace on the English Wikipedia since
December 2004. If so the 16 million may include those who haven't
edited since December 2004.
I'm probably missing a few other variables, I'm afraid this is a
complex area, but I hope this gives you an idea of the problem.
WSC
On 10 May 2012 16:35, Piotr Konieczny <pio...@post.pl
<mailto:pio...@post.pl>> wrote:
Thanks for the link. The figure 4,058,477 you cite (from
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution),
as you note, comes with the warning that "Only article edits are
counted, not edits on discussion pages, etc". I assume this is
why the magic word NUMBEROFUSERSat en Wikipedia returns
16,763,691 (numerous low activity editors apparently make their
few edits outside article mainspace).
The breakdown I could live with, for a while, but the fact that
this stat covers only about a quarter of registered accounts is a
problem. Is anybody familiar with a way to achieve a breakdown of
all named accounts with 1+ edit (for English Wikipedia), no
matter which namespace they edited? Preferably with more flexible
ranges than the ones in that table?
In other words, the linked page provides "Distribution of article
[namespace] edits over registered editors", whereas I am
interested in "Distribution of [all] namespaces edits over
registered editors".
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's
laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/10/2012 4:49 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
I'm not sure that we have exactly what your asking for.
For example we have the figure of 4,058,477 but that is for
registered accounts on the English Wikipedia that have made at
least one edit to an article. Different language versions of
Wikipedia are also available, but of course registered accounts
doesn't exactly tally with Wikipedians not least because IP
editors are excluded. Also I believe that early edits - pre 2004
may not be available and I suspect that deleted edits may not be
counted.
That said we have further stats of 1,614,938 registered accounts
with >= 3 article edits and 772,557 >=10
So
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution
is well worth looking at, but they break at 32 and 100 not 50
which may be a problem for you.
Hope that helps
WSC
On 9 May 2012 23:42, Piotr Konieczny <p...@pitt.edu
<mailto:p...@pitt.edu>> wrote:
I was looking at official stats, but I seem to be unable to
find out an answer to the following question:
* how many of Wikipedia editors have X edits (or fall within
a range of edits)
To be more precise, I am curious how many Wikipedians have:
* exactly 1 edit
* between 2-9 edits
* between 10-50 edits
I know that the total number of registered accounts is
reported at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians
Can anybody direct me to the right page/counter that would
allow me to obtain the above information? I hope it is
obtainable without having to download the dump...
Incidentally, if anybody has those numbers, in addition to
replying here feel free to add the information and/or source
the one present at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians
Thanks,
--
Piotr Konieczny
PhD Candidate
Dept of Sociology
Uni of Pittsburgh
http://pittsburgh.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
<mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l