Re: [Wikimedia-l] Very good news!

[Erik Zachte]

Some additional links:

Compare total editors per project (deduplicated) 
Caveat: only exists for active editors (5+ per month), not for very active 
editors (100+ edits per month)
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ProjectTrendsEditors.html

Here is a table with total monthly editors for all Wikimedia wikis combined 
(deduplicated)
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikimediaAllProjects_AllMonths.htm
and charts showing columns active editors 5+ and very active editors 100+ from 
that table.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editors_over_all_Wikimedia_wikis_-_deduplicated.png

As for causes, WereSpielCheckers wrote an essay in 2013:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/Going_off_the_boil%3F
and also did an 'In Focus' for Signpost in 2015:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-08-26/In_focus

As for edits, instead of editors:
On English Wikipedia monthly edits by registered users is visibly higher in 
2015 and 2016 than in 2013 and 2014 
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotEditsEN.png  (blue line)  
BTW way anonymous and bot edits are also higher than their low point in 
preceding years, but these metrics don't count for active editors trends.
For similar charts for other Wikipedias see 
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryTop.htm

Erik Zachte

P.S. unrelated but good to know if you dive into Wikistats: February 2017 
reports are incomplete (under investigation) 

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Alessandro Marchetti
Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2017 6:52
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Very good news!

These are data for English wikipedia, right?
You should compare the whole platforms. That's because bilingualism is 
increasing in many countries but not in the same direction. For example Italian 
students foreign language skills drastically increased over the last 10 years, 
so they edit also on English wikipedia. It's not sure that the opposite occurs. 
It's the same with emigration. Many 25-30 years old PhD students and Postdoc 
leave Italy and move to other countries. If that area is for example UK (a very 
common destination) they start to edit enwikipedia. This could happen also in 
France, whilst many of them have to learn German or Dutch or Swedish and it 
takes more time.
I "study" flow of users from platform, you can see when I leave welcome message 
or propose autopatrolled flag here and there and they are most probably 
asymmetrical at the moment.
If someone is interested, there are some way to try to sample this flows in an 
objective way. Happy to share with you.  

Il Domenica 19 Febbraio 2017 3:33, Milos Rancic  ha 
scritto:
 

 This is an extraordinary news for us! For almost 10 years I was hoping to see 
that and, finally, I've seen it!

In short, it seems that we reached the bottom in participation in 2014 and that 
we are now slowly going upwards.

My claim is based on the analysis [1] of the Eric Zachte's participation 
statistics on English Wikipedia [2], but I am almost sure that the rest of the 
projects more or less mirror it. But, anyway, I encourage others to check other 
projects and other relevant factors and see if their results correlate with 
what I have found. The reasons for the change in trends should be also detected.

If we are looking Eric's statistics from 2010 onwards, it is not immediately 
obvious if we are going up or down. We reached the peak in
2007 (German Wikipedia somewhat earlier, other projects later, but English 
Wikipedia is approximately 50% of our activity and its weight is too strong for 
other projects to balance our overall activity).
After that peak, we went down as quickly as we reached the peak. Then, in 2010, 
the trends flattened.

However, it was not a stagnation, but barely visible recession.
However, that "barely visible recession" removed approximately 20% of the very 
active editors in the period from 2010 to 2014, while the "visible one" -- from 
2007 to 2010 -- was also approximately 20%. At that point of time, in 2014, the 
next 10 years would for sure drive Wikipedia and Wikimedia movement into 
insignificance.

Comparing such data is also tricky. It's not just necessary to compare the same 
months (January 2010 with January 2011, 2012 etc.), but there could be "freak" 
months, which are not following general trends.

That's why I used two methods: One is coloring the months by place in 
comparison to the months of the previous years. The other is average number per 
year.

There are at least a couple of important conclusions:

1) Negative trends have been reversed.

2) Both 2015 and 2016 were not just better than 2013 and 2014, but even better 
than 2012, while 2016 is just a little bit worse than 2011!

3) December 2016 was even better than December 2010!

4) I could guess that the period June-November 2016 was worse than the same 
period in 2015 because 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF advanced permissions for employees

[Fæ]

Based on this email discussion there are a number of factual issues:

1. Though there is a page on Meta about WMF global bans, it includes no
explanation of the procedure that is followed by WMF employees. More about
this has been said by informal email and published here. A key benefit of
setting out the procedure and the required reviews, is that the WMF can be
held accountable against that procedure, whether or not the community
supports it.

2. It has been confirmed on this email list that a number of volunteers,
not under contract to the WMF, have been given access to details and
evidence behind WMF global bans. There is no policy or procedure that
explains how volunteers are allowed access, a level of access to evidence
that is not granted for the banned user, nor even their attorney.

3. As there is no published process, it is not possible for volunteers or
previously WMF globally banned users to work out if past bans lacked the
same level of independent review, or consultations with selected volunteers.

4. There is no clarification of how WMF employees are required to report
criminal acts to the police, yet for past bans the understanding of
volunteers is that part or all of the justification for an unexplained WMF
global ban was due to serious criminal acts. The impression given is that
at the moment the WMF chooses to avoid providing reports to the police, and
actively does the legal minimum, and insists on supoenas to share any data
with the police. From past cases we are aware that evidence used to justify
a WMF global ban is not provided to direct victims of harassment, or their
local police.

It seems sensible and ethical for the WMF to publish a process that
addresses these issues. There is no benefit in keeping the procedure itself
a secret, and in practice the secrecy around bans looks increasingly
dubious and unhelpful for victims of harassment, confusing for banned users
or those (like myself) subject to bad-faith threats of bans and a snub for
the Wikimedia community.

Fae


On 19 Feb 2017 04:16, "Pine W"  wrote:

> AJ,
>
> > "Just because volunteers are competent enough to deal with something
> doesn't
> > mean that they should be."
>
> Can you clarify that, please?
>
> > "Again, the difference here is between these
> > sensitive cases being handled by trained, experienced, legally
> accountable
> > professionals, or by volunteers who are part-time at best."
>
> I am puzzled by your lack of faith in the quality of work of our peers
> in the community. Why be so negative? We have produced Wikipedia;
> surely that is evidence that volunteers can be highly capable.
>
> Certainly not all volunteers are, of course, and some of them end up
> banned for good reason. But in general, I think there is good
> reason to have faith in our peers.
>
> I'm not sure how volunteers are not "legally accountable"; perhaps you
> could clarify that point.
>
> > How much time are you expecting the community-vetted volunteers to put in
> > here? Do we not already have our own responsibilities?
>
> I agree with you that a good use of WMF funds is to pay staff to work on
> investigations and enforcement. This can be done in such a way that
> there is always some kind of community element in a decision-maker role
> regarding whether to ban a member of the community.
>
> In addition to staff resources, I would like to see WMF put more effort
> into
> expanding the population of the volunteer community, particularly long-term
> volunteers who gain sufficient knowledge and experience to serve in
> higher-skill roles such as CU/OS, technical development, outreach to
> GLAM+STEM organizations, and mentorship of new Wikimedians.
>
> > You say that the current
> > system is broken, because... why?
>
> I say that the current system is inappropriate (not broken) because
> WMF should not be making decisions about who is banned from the community.
> The purpose of WMF is to serve and nurture the community, not to rule it.
>
> > The community doesn't deal with it?
> > That's a good thing. The community shouldn't need to deal with this
> stuff.
> > It's a blessing, not a curse.
>
> I agree that having staff involved in investigations and enforcement is a
> good thing.
> But as I said, I find it inappropriate and unwise for WMF to (1) have a
> largely opaque
> process for making these decisions and (2) exclude the community from
> the decision-making process.
>
> > It might be worth explaining some more of the
> > bans process publicly, perhaps on a wiki page, to alleviate fears that
> it's
> > just being used to get rid of people that the Foundation doesn't like.
>
> I agree with you.
>
> I think that global bans are reasonable options in some cases. In terms of
> quantity, I would like to see more of them and to see bans initiated more
> quickly, such as against undisclosed COI editors who violate the terms of
> service.
> I would also like to see better technical tools for enforcing bans. But I
>