PS. This story was triggered by Fastily's retirement. He has 46000 edits on enwiki, and only about 620 editors have reached that plateau. Of these, 90% are still active. So such retirements are relatively rare. Personally, I hope he decides to come back after taking some time to relax and recharge. It seems to be the case that many such declared retirements aren't really permanent.
-Robert Rohde On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Robert Rohde <raro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <pute...@mccme.ru> > wrote: > <snip> > >> 1. What is the average lifetime of a Wikipedia editor (for instance the one >> with at leat 1000 contributions)? I recollect smth about two years, but I am >> pretty sure I have never seen any research on this. How does it depend on >> the number of contributions? > > For enwiki, using data from last August: > > 28243 users have at least 1000 edits (all namespaces). > > Of these, 9898 had not edited in the six months before the end of the data > set. > > So about 65% of the major editors are still active, at least occasionally. > > The mean wiki-lifetime for the 28243 major users was 49.9 months. > > For the 9898 users who were not recently active, the mean > wiki-lifetime was 35.6 months. > > > Further, there are 4685 users with at least 10000 edits, and of these, > all but 914 were still active in the last 6 months of the data set. > So 80% of the editors at the very high end are still active (at least > occasionally). The mean wiki-lifetime on the total group is 60.5 > months, and the departed group is 42.6 months. > > > Incidentally, the mean account age of individuals editing article > space is now over 3 years for enwiki. A lot of the work is being by > the relative old-timers. By the same token though, people who have > ever made it to 1000 edits are more likely than not to still be active > today. > > -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l