Hi, Is there any research about the influence of autopromote variables on participation, editor retention, and such things?
I am mainly talking about $wgAutoConfirmAge and $wgAutoConfirmCount. See the current values at http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php These are different in various languages, and they seem rather random to me. The idea is supposed to be to prevent vandalism without hurting wikiness and editor retention, but are the current values based on any analytics? I went over all the bugs that are mentioned in the file to which I linked above. All of them say "we had a discussion and we reached a consensus". I cannot read all these languages, but my wild guess is that people just threw some numbers around without basing it on analytics, and voted to accept them. The discussion in the English Wikipedia[1] is, non-surprisingly, the longest (47 A4 pages); I didn't read it all, but it doesn't seem to be based on any metrics either. Anecdotally, I can recall many more times when I, as a Wikipedian, had to explain people that they need to do a few more edits to get a permission to move pages, than I had to revert bad page moves by new editors, so there is a possibility that the autopromote values are not actually very good. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal/Poll -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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