One of my experiences from the death anomaly project is that different language communities vary quite sharply as to their tolerance of unsourced edits.
I suspect that by 2010 the English Wikipedia had already gone through the transition on this, and that those editors we were going to lose by having their unsourced edits reverted had largely gone. We still lose a large proportion of newbies, and I think we should find better ways to communicate with those who make unsourced edits. But I can understand that this would lead to EN wiki being further on the path to a smaller community that edits to a more rigorous standard. What would be interesting would be to chart our different communities and their retention rates by the point that they went through various transitions. This could test both the theory that reversion of goodfaith but unsourced edits is causing the change, and it would test and I hope disprove the theory that flagged revisions deters new editors. The other big change that has happened on EN and is EN specific is the growth of other projects that may have syphoned away a large proportion of editors who started in EN. Has anyone used SUL to chart patterns of editors shifting their project focus? My suspicion is that many formerly active EN Wikipedians are still active elsewhere in Wikimedia, it would be interesting to know which were our recruiter and destination projects and how that has changed over time. WSC, On 5 September 2012 01:57, Gwern Branwen <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:22 PM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I don't disagree with the overall results - editor numbers are still > > in decline - but I think it's worth including the caveat that the > > numbers reported on the wikistats site have recently been adjusted > > downwards by around 5% - > > > http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/ > > > > The result is that Howie's quote above is doubly unlikely - it's based > > on an inflated estimate of how many editors we had then. Our figures > > for Aug 2011 are now 76,126 rather than the 81,450 quoted; adjusting > > his target accordingly, this would make it around 89,500. Still a long > > way to go, though, whichever you use! > > Whups. > > > One last interesting point: the 2010 drop was mostly a non-en.wp event; > the drop on en.wp was proportionally much less. I have no idea as to the > likely cause of this. > > Perhaps the damage has already been done on En? I would've suggested > that maybe the WMF retention initiatives might have not failed > entirely, except I don't remember any of them being finished in 2010, > much less being able to affect the overall wiki so much. > > -- > gwern > http://www.gwern.net > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
