Comments on: Improving the accuracy of the active editors metric http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/ News from the Wikimedia Foundation and about the Wikimedia movement Fri, 24 May 2013 10:54:31 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6-beta2-24176 By: NaBUru38 http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-140213 NaBUru38 Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:50:08 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-140213 This updated measure seems very reasonable.

]]> By: Erik Zachte http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-140210 Erik Zachte Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:39:11 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-140210 Harry, your are correct. Five years ago single User Login [1] came into effect. From that moment new users could not chose any name already existing on any wiki. And most existing accounts were unified via a multi-step procedure that resolved name conflicts. Some users may have chosen to skip this process, despite its clear benefits. Then again users that left the project before mid 2008 missed this opportunity anyway to collect their contribution trail under an unified account. So this is an approximation indeed, but good enough it seems given the above. Further assessment (via central authorisation database) is not exactly trivial, and will not resolve all ambiguities anyway, particularly for our earlier contribution history.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-26/Single_User_Login

]]> By: Erik Zachte http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-140203 Erik Zachte Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:22:28 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-140203 Andre, you raise the $64,000 question. This has been noticed before and discussed time and again. As for the suddenness of the change I have no clue. In general it is very tricky to try to explain complex social phenomena, where many factors play a role. Two aspects I would suggest to take into the equation: saturation of awareness among internet users [1], and evening out of expectations after novelty effect wears out [2]. Other factors are important to assess how well Wikipedia did in recent years, in a world where many people sign up to internet every year, but more and more social sites compete for attention, but that is beyond the issue raised here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_saturation
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

]]> By: Harry Burt http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-140192 Harry Burt Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:55:13 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-140192 Never mind, apparently I can’t read since that information is clearly given in the post.

]]> By: Harry Burt http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-139897 Harry Burt Sun, 02 Sep 2012 12:05:22 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-139897 Just to confirm, if editor A and editor B share a username, this is a sufficient condition for them to be assumed to be the same?

]]> By: Andre Engels http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/08/31/improving-the-accuracy-of-the-active-editors-metric/comment-page-1/#comment-139497 Andre Engels Sat, 01 Sep 2012 06:20:20 +0000 http://blog.wikimedia.org/?p=17222#comment-139497 What I find remarkable about this graph is the suddenness with which one behaviour changed into the other. Until the first months of 2007 the number of editors grows rapidly, possibly exponentially. After that, there is a slow decrease with a seasonal effect (more in the Northern hemisphere Winter than in its Summer). There is no period of decreasing growth between them (the growth does seem to be a bit slower in the second half of 2007 than before, but the change from growth to no growth is still a very sudden one). To me this does seem to indicate that there is some fundamental change that is at work here – if the change was caused by some factor like ‘running out of subjects to write about’, I would expect a more gradual change.

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