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Seeking recent editor stratification research
Does anybody know of recent work that updates the findings of m:Research:Editor classes or strategy:Editor Trends Study? I have poked around a bit but haven't found anything that works on the same issues; stats.wikimedia.org doesn't quite get into those issues AFAICT. Doesn't need to be formal research; I'd be interested in anything that people have found from just tooling around on toolserver or diving in the dumps. -- Visviva (talk) 18:06, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
As an update, I have been doing some initial poking around in the latest stub-meta-history dump. One thing that jumps out at me is that something odd was happening in 2014: that year saw a dramatic jump in new users in the 1-9 mainspace edits band (>70k absolute, >15% YoY), but also saw sharp drops in the absolute number of edits being made by editors in the 1k-9k and 10k+ mainspace-edit bands (which were largely reversed in subsequent years). I looked through the Signpost archives but didn't see anything that would indicate a titanic shift in wiki practice that year. But I wasn't very active at that time, so I don't really know what might have been happening that would have made 2014 special. Any ideas? -- Visviva (talk) 21:38, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
- Interesting work. The only thing I can think of re 2014 was that it was the first full year when both the VisualEditor and the notifications feature were enabled, though I'm not sure how much effect either of these things might have had. Mobile viewing and editing were becoming more popular as indicated by this, but once again, that probably wasn't a seismic shift. Graham87 08:42, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- Ooh, thanks, good thought. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense: barriers to editing come down so long-tail activity picks up, while "power users" get annoyed and their activity drops. (I recall having some rather cranky things to say about the VisualEditor myself, although my power user days were long behind me at that point.) And that same annoyance could explain the subsequent reversion to trend: annoyed power users make changes to policy and practice that push the balance back toward exclusion. Will be interesting to see if this holds once I've cleaned up the data a little better. -- Visviva (talk) 22:09, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Visviva, is that the all-wikis database? If so, then I believe you will see a quite dramatic effect at the Portuguese Wikipedia, which (if memory serves) had unusually stringent CAPTCHA rules in place until December 2013. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Whatamidoing (WMF): I've never heard of a database dump for all wikis and I can't find it on the relevant page. Can you point me to such a thing if it exists? Graham87 05:34, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- I don't know how the dumps are arranged. I just saw on the page that there were 16,666,393 pages in the mainspace, which is 10 million more than our current 6,563,888 mainspace articles, and it sounded approximately plausible to me as the number of articles if you added all the Wikipedias together. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- It's just the EN database. I believe 16.7M is accurate as the approximate total number of pages in mainspace (i.e. including redirects and other very short pages that NUMBEROFARTICLES excludes.) I found a version of that number ... uh, somewhere ... that jibed with my result, which was a nice feeling at the time -- although now I can't seem to find it. -- Visviva (talk) 22:00, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- It's at Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace. We have a grand total of about 59,000,000 articles on all Wikipedias. Graham87 12:53, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Whatamidoing (WMF): I've never heard of a database dump for all wikis and I can't find it on the relevant page. Can you point me to such a thing if it exists? Graham87 05:34, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Visviva, is that the all-wikis database? If so, then I believe you will see a quite dramatic effect at the Portuguese Wikipedia, which (if memory serves) had unusually stringent CAPTCHA rules in place until December 2013. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
- Ooh, thanks, good thought. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense: barriers to editing come down so long-tail activity picks up, while "power users" get annoyed and their activity drops. (I recall having some rather cranky things to say about the VisualEditor myself, although my power user days were long behind me at that point.) And that same annoyance could explain the subsequent reversion to trend: annoyed power users make changes to policy and practice that push the balance back toward exclusion. Will be interesting to see if this holds once I've cleaned up the data a little better. -- Visviva (talk) 22:09, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- In case any of my fellow randos wander across this conversation, I'll note for posterity that after removing bots, there is still something of an anomaly, but it can be further qualified by two things: (1) the increase in long-tail registered user edits was only a small fraction of the decrease in IP edits during the same year, so it may just reflect an interface change that nudged people away from anonymous editing; (2) with bots removed, it is clearer that the drop in power user activity in the four-digit band was a continuation of a long-term downward trend from 2007 to 2014 (subsequently partially reversed), while the five-digit band didn't really move much (this was obscured by the 2013 surge in bot activity in relation to the transition of interwiki links to Wikidata, which made 2014 look like a sharp drop). There were clearly some significant shifts happening around 2014, but exactly what they were remains unclear to me. -- Visviva (talk) 18:23, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- The 2007 trend was probably due (at least in part) to a declining need for anti-vandal patrolling. In 2005, obvious vandalism was reverted manually. By 2007, the bots would revert it before you could even get the diff open.
- As for things leveling off around 2014 trend, I think you'd want to investigate the rise of the visual editor, and the introduction of Wikidata (which should decrease local edits).
- The research that I've long wished for is about the difference between "edits" and "writing articles". I can make copyedits like this one in my sleep. But this content-heavy edit likely benefits the world more. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:31, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Central discussion on editor retention and recruitment?
I periodically see comments, essays and articles about Wikipedia's desire to retain and recruit editors (e.g. Why Aren’t There More Wikipedia Editors? and WP:Why is Wikipedia losing contributors). I am wondering if there is a single location here or at Meta-Wiki for discussion of the issue. Thanks. — AjaxSmack 03:33, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention might be of interest. -- Visviva (talk) 03:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I don't know how my search failed to turn up that obvious one. — AjaxSmack 04:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- As someone who's been involved with the retention project from the start, I didn't bring it up initially, because in truth the discussion page may not have the right mix of active page watchers to collaborate on new initiatives. There's no harm in starting a discussion there, though, and followup discussions can be brought to another venue if necessary. isaacl (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I don't know how my search failed to turn up that obvious one. — AjaxSmack 04:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Ken C Griffin "Mayonnaise incident".
I was just wondering if we could add the Mayonnaise incident to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin aswell as the recent news of his supoponea? I know wikipedia only includes factual evidence and so if anyone at the event would be able to vouch it would be great. I know other people's articles have this sort of thing but the story looks legit aswell as the subopena (tesla subopena), is 100% facutal. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/n8tvrx/my_friend_had_dinner_with_kenny_g/ Nexxotic (talk) 03:51, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- Shall we count the policies that would violate? Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Biographies of Living Persons, Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is Not, for starters. - Donald Albury 15:29, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- I personally vote we skip with the formality of adding that the man does not share his mayonnaise, according to renowned historian and journalist niandra__lades7, and move to have him publicly executed. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 15:08, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
News about Wikipedia in Lokmat
There is a change of cabinets in the state of Maharashtra, India. Today in Lokmat there is a negative media regarding vandalism of MLA's article on Wikipedia. (Read news here). Requesting Admins to take note and take appropriate actions if necessary. Thanks and regards --✝iѵɛɳ२२४०†ลℓк †๏ мэ 04:11, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
- The article is in Marathi and Google Translate doesn't work on it, but I dug a bit and think I found the issue. A rogue editor (Sahil193319) changed the party affiliation of several politicians; the articles in question can be seen in their contribs. I think they're all fixed, but if any were missed, please link them, as again that article is in Marathi and Google Translate isn't working on it. Curbon7 (talk) 06:37, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
Discord ban
I got banned from the Wikipedia Discord with no reason, my username is h moment#9731 UnnamedWasTaken (talk) 18:07, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
- That's run by different people. See Wikipedia:Discord#How is Wikimedia Community Discord related to Wikipedia?. If you're asking to be unbanned, you need to address that to the people who run the Discord server. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:15, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
- But there is no dicussion board there, if you have no answer, don't give an reply. UnnamedWasTaken (talk) 18:33, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
New Upload Tool - Sunflower
Hey folks, I recently created a new upload tool for Commons called Sunflower. If you have a Mac, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could try it out and share your feedback. Thanks! -FASTILY 08:27, 12 August 2022 (UTC)