On 4 September 2012 21:01, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576532431335938862.html > September 2011 > >> Adding more editors “is one of our top priorities for the year,” says Howie >> Fung…aims to increase the number of editors across all languages of >> Wikipedia to 95,000 from 81,450 by June of next year. > > From http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaZZ.htm using the >5 > edits a month metric used in WMF docs: > > 1. July 2012: 76,400 > 2. June 2012: 74,402 > 3. May 2012: 76,956 > 4. April 2012: 75,141 > 5. March 2012; 76,274 > > The high water mark, incidentally, seems to have been March 2007 with > 90,618 editors >5 edits that month. So we have been shrinking ~2.8k > editors a year ((91 - 77) / (2012 - 2007)). In retrospect, my 75% > prediction that this priority would not be achieved > (http://predictionbook.com/predictions/3241) was ludicrously > optimistic, given that the 95k editor mark has *never* been reached.
I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted downwards by around 5% - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/ The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long way to go, though, whichever you use! I've quickly graphed the recent numbers (just focusing on the period after the initial exponential growth, so starting in 2007): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated.svg It seems that the rate of decline may be slowing, at least. Which I guess is something. The really interesting part comes from separating out the data for the English Wikipedia, which is 30% down from its 2007 peak, down from 50,000 editors to 35,000 - the graph is smoother, but otherwise looks very similar to the first one. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated_-_English_only.svg In fact, the decline on en.wp is so steep that it actually represents almost all the overall decline in the projects; if you look at the totals for every project except en.wp, the graph jumps around a bit but is actually quite stable. Since the start of 2008, the three-month moving average has always been 40,000 editors +- 5%. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_editor_numbers_2007-2012_recalculated_-_Non-English_Wikipedias_only.svg One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the likely cause of this. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
