Dear Haifeng Zhang,
If I were you, looking at this, I'd watch out for templates. Templates
particularly substituted ones involve a lot of bytes that someone hasn't
typed. I recently did an edit that involved me typing {{subst|Infobox
academic}} you might be surprised how many bytes that generated. And how
many more key depressions that edit involved compared to my typical edit.
Similarly reversion can involve adding a lot of bytes, but on further
inspection you might simple be reverting a vandal who removed four
paragraphs of text that others had contributed.
You might also want to look at an editors edit rate per hour, and time
since their previous edit. If their previous edit was half an hour earlier
they might have been making a cup of tea, cutting the grass or taking a
phone call, or they might have spent half an hour on that edit. But if they
have made forty edits in that previous half hour then you are pretty safe
to assume that those edits on average represent less than a minute of work.
As well as what Kerry said, there are two things you might want to take
into consideration. Firstly those of us with experience of breaking news
stories quickly learn the hard way to save little and often, especially on
a topical subject. Take for example the article on Sarah Palin in the hours
after she was announced as John McCain's running mate. My memory was of
multiple concurrent edit wars and a tidal wave of vandalism, I went back
later and measured it as peaking at 25 edits per minute, I don't think we
even log the edits lost to edit conflicts, but in practice anyone clicking
the edit button at the top was going to get an edit conflict - your only
chance of getting an edit to save would have been to edit by section.
Secondly, over time editors pick up tools, some of which make a big
difference to edit rates. Edit summaries are a good indicator of this,
watch for words such as Twinkle, Hotcat, Huggle and AWB. I haven't used
Catalot on Wikipedia, but it is the reason why my edit count is higher on
Wikimedia commons, despite my spending rather more time on Wikipedia.
Regards
Jonathan
On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 22:44, Haifeng Zhang <haife...@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Dear folks,
>
> Are there studies that have examined what might affect edit size (e.g., #
> of words add/delete/modify in each revision). I am especially interested in
> the impact of editor's tenure/experience.
>
> Thanks,
> Haifeng Zhang
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