> De: Yaroslav M. Blanter <[email protected]> > Para: Felipe Ortega <[email protected]>; Research into Wikimedia > content and communities <[email protected]> > CC: > Enviado: Jueves 3 de Mayo de 2012 11:48 > Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] long in tooth: highly active editors are 1/3 > fewer > >> These are very interesting figures, but only for EN Wikipedia. I >> concur with Gerard in that we also need to compare figures with other >> languages, specially outside the group of large Wikipedias. >> >> The generational relay is a well-known effect in open communities >> (for instance, it has also been studied in open source projects). >> However, the size of the community and the size of the group of core >> contributions does matter. Losing 3 persons in a group of ~500 can be >> probably assumed by the rest of the group, whereas losing the same 3 >> in a group of 20 is a very different story. >> >> Furthermore, the duration of idle periods (between two consecutive >> edits) is also important. I am conducting a systematic analysis of >> this factor (that is, no sampling), against other relevant metrics >> (lifetime, number of edits or date of the first edit). It is not >> unfrequent for "casual editors" (< 100 edits) to have idle > periods of >> more than 2 or even more than 4 years. But this idle period is usually >> shorter for core editors (longest periods usually between 3-6 months). >> >> I mention this because, according to one of the comments on >> >> >> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits#Suggest_explaining_what_it_means_to_have_a_user_name_in_black_.2Flinkless >> >> the meaning of "inactive" top editors in this list is (verbatim): >> "editors with more than 30 days since the last edit". I find this >> definition of "inactive editor" at least questionable under the > light >> of these results about idle periods. >> >>> The first conclusion is that editors with over 35K edits are much less > likely to >>> leave, increasingly unlikely as the # of edits goes up. This is clearly >>> statistically significant. >>> >>> The second conclusion is that there is major loss of editors with about > 20K >>> edits. I am not sure how statistically significant this is. >>> >> >> Since the table is clustered by rank, rather than by number of edits, >> I would report instead about "top-2000" or "top-2500", > since absolute >> figures in the table are actually meaningful just relative to the >> performance of other editors. I would also try to normalize edits by >> lifetime, to compensate the fact that editors with longer lifetime had >> better chances to make more edits (which may hide fast-raising >> trends). But the, admittedly, that would be a different table for a >> different purpose... >> >>> I obviously did not try to correlate this with the lifetime, but if we > take 10K >>> edits per year as an example, 2 years would be the most probable > lifetime. >>> Richard Rohde reported slightly higher numbers. >>> >>> So, yes, indeed, the editors leave after a couple of years, and they do > not get >>> replaced. >>> >> >> In any case, I believe this is the key question to answer. Trying to >> characterize editors who stopped their activity, either temporarily or >> permanently, is only one half of the picture. The other half is >> learning what was the path that core editors followed till they got >> there, and why now we have fewer people following that path. >> >> Why is this interesting for the whole Wikipedia community? Just for >> the fun of counting edits? For the sake of competition? No. It is >> important because very active editors are supposed to have much more >> experience in the project, and that experience, that knowledge about >> the editing process, about how to interact with other community >> members, and how to build valuable content is a crucial asset for >> Wikipedia. Thus, I think that the focus should also include senior >> members outside the list of top editors, but with a long-time >> experience (e.g. +5 years). Let me recall that the vast majority of >> authors who have participated in FAs had a total lifetime of more than >> 3 years (+1,000 days) in Wikipedia, for all big languages (note: also >> for most of the middle-size Wikipedias). >> >> Last, but not least, there is another important connection with >> maintenance activity. Editors with special accounts (e.g. sysops) may >> become idle for several days in article editing, but they continue to >> perform administrative duties systematically. As a result, the trends >> in the number of new admins and RFAs, and number of administrative >> changes performed over time should also complement this picture (since >> many, many admins were not among the most prolific editors when they >> were appointed). >> >> Best, >> Felipe. >> > > Thanks Felipe. You obviously raise very relevant questions (one more would be > about blocked users, some of which I clearly recognize as inactive editors in > the list), but they are subjects of real research like yours, not of smth I > can > do on a coffie-break taking a break from my own research (in a completely > different field). >
Thanks to you, Yaroslav. It may looks like a little contribution, but I would say it was a very useful coffe-break to nurture comments on this important topic :). Saludos, Felipe. > Cheers > Yaroslav > ----- Mensaje original ----- _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
