Why do you appear to assume bad faith relative to this who initiative? The WMF people I know are earnest, eager, serious, hard working, and want real answers. That’s way better than free-floating gratuitous over-generalizations.

This project is a terrific one. Someone is willing to pay anyone in the community who can solve a real problem, which when solved, can be used to promote the welfare of the community. And the problem with this is? There isn’t a problem. None whatsoever.

As for barriers to diversity which need to be better understood and resolved, here’s one which has been well-documented: We don’t have a good gender balance, and we lose female editors at a rate higher than for male editors. I don’t find this acceptable, and think we need to figure out what’s happening and try to fix it. Is this a bad idea? Hardly. Might some rigorous data modeling help us with it? You bet. So…get to work.

Are you nerdy? If yes, Wikipedia editting += 3
Are you in a relationship? If yes, Wikipedia editting -= 2
Do you have kids? If yes, Wikipedia editting -= (number of kids)
Are you currently out of work? If yes, Wikipedia editting += 2
Are you upper or middle class? If yes, Wikipedia editting += 1
Are you a young male between the age of 15 and 35? If yes, Wikipedia editting += 2

Listen, WMF, it’s obvious: people edit Wikipedia if they care, if they have the time, and if they can have the ability. A fundamental truth is this: the people who want to edit Wikipedia will edit Wikipedia but not all demographics equally want to do it. The Foundation cannot FORCE the editorship to be uniform across all demographics. Unfortunately, in the name of “promoting diversity”, the Foundation is going to interpret the results of this contest in a way that implies there’s barriers to participation that must be fixed. Policy trying to force a more uniform demographic. This is utterly utterly misguided.

What’s the point of predicting only about recent editors, whose ranks have already been thoroughly harrowed by the endless tightening of policy and rise of deletionists? Wikipedia already has a horrendous reputation for screwing over contributors*, so anyone who does much editing (and whose departure would be noticed by the criterion) is self-selecting now.

* just the other day cryonics researcher Mike Darwin told me he had no interest in contributing because he was sure all his contributions would be reverted under an extremely narrow reading of WP:RS, and wondered whether his BLP article could just be deleted since he certainly wasn’t going to edit it into an article worth a damn

What you notice are other editors fact-bombing your articles, putting them up for deletion, chopping them up in futile reformattings, and deleting random lines. That’s the incredibly dispiriting part of working on Wikipedia. Look at the parting messages in WP:MISSING. How many of them are complaining about the petty anonymous vandalism? Now how many sound like my little summary just now…

I will be *very* interested to see what the models put weight on. I suspect that the key parameter will be ‘how many of their contributions get deleted or massively changed’, and the longer the time their contributions live before getting deleted, the more predictive of eventual quitting… (This doesn’t necessarily require deleted edits to be available to the modellers, although that would certainly help.)

As for the model, good luck, this sounds useful if rather complex. Would I be right in thinking that deleted edits are not available to these modellers?