Oh yeah, the Account Creation proccess, article upload wizard, and commons image uploading process has some effect as well. In optimizing one or a few times contributions, we perhaps also do not pique interest in further content creation. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't have even tried before. I move to the former, based on the stats.
On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Keegan Paul <kgnp...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 12:57 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxw...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 12:49 AM, Keegan Paul <kgnp...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm >> > >> > <http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm>It's obvious of >> the >> > peak in January of 2007. >> > >> > What I'm interested in is thoughts of why New Contributors has >> statistically >> > declined sharply, but the list of active contributors has much less of a >> > slope and even less so for very active contributors. >> > >> > What happened in the first six months of 2007? Did we change template >> > systems? Did we reword some policies relating to new users? >> >> Careful not to mistake a decline in the derivative of a function to be >> a decline in the function. The number of new contributors _must_ >> decline at some point, unless you hold a hypothesis that Wikipedia >> will eventually be driving the growth of human population. ;) >> >> The step function in December 2005 is clearly due to >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_biography_controversy#Wikimedia_Foundation_reaction >> >> The only thing I recall happening around June 2007 was the >> introduction of a real captcha. Might be relevant if a non-trivial >> amount of the new accounts were spambot sleepers! >> >> I don't recall how those stats are generated. If they are produced >> from the public data then there will be odd distortions due to >> deletions hiding accounts.. >> >> I think there were also changes to the upload procedure around that >> time (the interface language abuse for an upload wizard) which started >> directing users to commons to upload... and uploading is a primary >> reason to create an account. This seems to be at least weakly >> supported by the stats on commons: >> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaCOMMONS.htm >> >> I'd guess that like most things its probably a mixture of weak effects. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> WikiEN-l mailing list >> WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l >> > > Oh sure, figures lie and liars figure. Like stereotypes, from a broad > lens, they make sense. > > I think captcha probably had a good deal to do with it. Good point there > to mention. The systemization of procedures is a good point as well, > whether it be uploading or bot-assisted and the functionality of automated > tools like huggle and twinkle. > > With these thoughts in mind, the good thing is that the standard userbase > numbers are consistent. > > Thanks Greg, other thoughts? > > ~Keegan > -- > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan > -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l