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, 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. > Cheers > Yaroslav > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > 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 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
