Piotr,

I've had a reasonable success rate by filing requests at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests. Several programmers
keep an eye on it and if they think the task interesting and useful you may
get lucky.

WSC

On 16 May 2012 18:09, Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]> wrote:

>  Dario,
>
> Thanks, but the last time I looked into this, running queries required
> knowing how to code going way beyond a simple knowledge of wiki syntax or
> excel functions. I think it was at WikiSym few years back where we raised
> that issue - that much of the data Wikimedia provides is limited to the
> small subset of scholars who can code with pretty names like Java or Pearl
> and such. I am pretty sure this is the reason for why social sciences have
> been lagging in Wikipedia research since day one...
>
> Now, if I am wrong about any of the above, do let me know. But the last
> time I looked at
> https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Database_access#Command-line_access it
> didn't look too user friendly (for a non-coder).
>
> Is there any place where a non-coder can ask a Toolserv coder to run some
> of those queries? I'd be happy to trade some of my Wiki skills (as in,
> writing a DYK, or reviewing a GA) for such assistance :)
>
> --
> 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 2:29 PM, Dario Taraborelli wrote:
>
> 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#editdistributionis 
>> 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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>>>
>>
>>
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