Piotr, 

if you are interested in getting fresh figures about lifetime edit counts I 
recommend you register an account on the toolserver where you can run queries 
against the user table (which holds cumulative edit counts across all 
namespaces for a specific wiki). For namespace-specific counts you will need to 
use the revision table and that's much more time consuming.

On a related note, this real-time dashboard I just uploaded to the toolserver 
(representing account registrations and the fraction of new users clicking on 
the edit button or passing the 1 edit threshold ) could be of interest 
http://toolserver.org/~dartar/reg2/

Best
Dario

On May 10, 2012, at 10:57 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:

> Hi Piotr,
> 
> You might make the assumption that the difference between 4 million and 16 
> million is largely editors who never get out of userspace, my experience is 
> that such users are relatively rare, or at least won't dominate that 12 
> million. 
> 
> I'm fairly sure that there will be a number of different groups in that 12 
> million. Steve Walling, Aaron or Maryana may be able to help analyse or at 
> least explain them.
> 
> Significant groups in the 12 million will definitely include:
> 
> 1 People who registered an account and tried but never successfully saved an 
> edit because when they looked they saw a wall of code and they don't do html. 
> The WMF is investing a lot of money in WYSIWYG editing software in the hope 
> that this will enable goodfaith but not very technical people to edit 
> Wikipedia. 
> 
> 2 Vandals since 2007. We have edit filters that are trying to dissuade 
> vandals from saving their first edit because it triggers  one of our tests  
> for probably being vandalism. These filters only came in during the last few 
> years and have been improved over time - so they are deterring a significant 
> proportion of recent badfaith editors from ever saving an edit.
> 
> 3 Visitors from other wikis. One of the features of Single User Login is that 
> if you are logged in and you click on a link that takes you to another 
> wikimedia wiki, your account becomes active at that wiki even if you never go 
> near the edit button. My account is active on 92 wikis and I've edited in 
> rather less than half of them. I won't go into all the reasons why one might 
> visit other wikis, but if you see that an article you've written has 
> equivalents in several other languages I consider it human nature to click on 
> the links and look at the article. Even if you don't use Google translate, 
> the choice of image and the size of the paragraphs is often enough to tell 
> you whether someone has translated your work or started afresh. 
> 
> 4 Editors whose articles have been deleted. About a quarter of new editors 
> start by creating a new article rather than by editing existing articles. A 
> large majority of such articles get deleted and their authors depart. If the 
> 4 million is only measured on surviving edits to article space then there 
> will be many hundreds of thousands whose only article space edits have been 
> deleted.
> 
> 5 Zombie accounts. We now have programs that prevent people opening accounts 
> that are overly similar to the names of existing editors, but before these 
> filters came in many editors would protect themselves from such impersonation 
> by creating such  "zombie accounts" themselves and marking their userpage 
> with a link to their main account.
> 
> 6 Edit conflicts. Breaking news stories attract editors like moths to flames, 
> our article on Sarah Palin peaked at 25 edits per minute at one point during 
> the day she became John McCain's running mate (I don't think anyone logs the 
> number of edit conflicts). If you are a newbie trying to edit a trending 
> article by using that edit button on the top of the page then you are 
> guaranteed to get frustrated and leave. The regulars have learned that busy 
> pages are best edited one section at a time, and on a very busy page there 
> simply isn't time to edit the whole page before a section edit is saved. Of 
> course that could be easily resolved by disabling whole page editing on busy 
> pages, but I'm not expecting that anytime soon.
> 
> Another issue is that I believe that the 4 million are people who have one 
> undeleted edit to mainspace on the English Wikipedia since December 2004. If 
> so the 16 million may include those who haven't edited since December 2004.
> 
> I'm probably missing a few other variables, I'm afraid this is a complex 
> area, but I hope this gives you an idea of the problem.
> 
> WSC
> 
> 
> 
> On 10 May 2012 16:35, Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for the link. The figure 4,058,477 you cite (from 
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution), as you 
> note, comes with the warning that "Only article edits are counted, not edits 
> on discussion pages, etc". I assume this is why the magic word NUMBEROFUSERS 
> at en Wikipedia returns 16,763,691 (numerous low activity editors apparently 
> make their few edits outside article mainspace).
> 
> The breakdown I could live with, for a while, but the fact that this stat 
> covers only about a quarter of registered accounts is a problem. Is anybody 
> familiar with a way to achieve a breakdown of all named accounts with 1+ edit 
> (for English Wikipedia), no matter which namespace they edited? Preferably 
> with more flexible ranges than the ones in that table?
> 
> In other words, the linked page provides "Distribution of article [namespace] 
> edits over registered editors", whereas I am interested in "Distribution of 
> [all] namespaces edits over registered editors".
>  --
> Piotr Konieczny
> 
> "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on 
> one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
> 
> On 5/10/2012 4:49 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>> 
>> I'm not sure that we have exactly what your asking for.
>> 
>> For example we have the figure of 4,058,477 but that is for registered 
>> accounts on the English Wikipedia that have made at least one edit to an 
>> article. Different language versions of Wikipedia are also available, but of 
>> course registered accounts doesn't exactly tally with Wikipedians not least 
>> because IP editors are excluded. Also I believe that early edits - pre 2004 
>> may not be available and I suspect that deleted edits may not be counted.
>> 
>> That said we have further stats of 1,614,938 registered accounts with >= 3 
>> article edits and 772,557 >=10
>> 
>> So http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution is 
>> well worth looking at, but they break at 32 and 100 not 50 which may be a 
>> problem for you.
>> 
>> Hope that helps
>> 
>> WSC
>> 
>> On 9 May 2012 23:42, Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I was looking at official stats, but I seem to be unable to find out an 
>> answer to the following question:
>> * how many of Wikipedia editors have X edits (or fall within a range of 
>> edits)
>> To be more precise, I am curious how many Wikipedians have:
>> * exactly 1 edit
>> * between 2-9 edits
>> * between 10-50 edits
>> I know that the total number of registered accounts is reported at 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians
>> 
>> Can anybody direct me to the right page/counter that would allow me to 
>> obtain the above information? I hope it is obtainable without having to 
>> download the dump...
>> 
>> Incidentally, if anybody has those numbers, in addition to replying here 
>> feel free to add the information and/or source the one present at 
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> -- 
>> Piotr Konieczny
>> PhD Candidate
>> Dept of Sociology
>> Uni of Pittsburgh
>> 
>> http://pittsburgh.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny/
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
>> 
>> 
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