There are gobs and gobs* of people using VE. Many of them are experienced editors. I'm also interested in looking at VE adoption over time (especially by veteran editors). I'll sniff around and let y'all know if I find anything. No idea what might be causing the boost in active editor numbers. But it's exciting to see :) Anyone else have data that bears on these questions? - J *non-scientific estimate drawn from anecdata On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 9:53 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

It looks like about 10% of highly active Enwiki editors have used VE in the past month (across all namespaces): http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/4795 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:35 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

I asked her and yes the VE has made a big difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Megalibrarygirl#Using_the_Visual_Ed… (for what I said) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kerry_Raymond#Visual_Editor (for her reply) So, one success story! Kerry From: Kerry Raymond [mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, 18 August 2015 9:37 AM To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: RE: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? Woo hoo! I’m #9 in the table! But seriously that’s probably less than 10% of my edits. For that same group, what percentage of their edits does the VE represent? I notice that #1 on the list User:Megalibrarygirl appears to be using VE almost exclusively at the present, but started out on the source editor. Interestingly I notice that among her recent non-VE edits mention adding infoboxes in the edit summary (which is something which is a total pain in the VE). This user has also massively increased her number of edits recently, might be interesting to know if the VE is a factor in this. I will ask her. Kerry From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Tuesday, 18 August 2015 4:11 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? It looks like about 10% of highly active Enwiki editors have used VE in the past month (across all namespaces): http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/4795 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:35 AM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: On a very non-scientific measure of how few editors currently use V/E, I took some snapshots of the most recent 500 mainspace edits <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500&days=30> yesterday and was getting circa 1% tagged as visual editor, I've just run two sample this afternoon and the first had not a single edit tagged Visual editor and the other only four, so unless some of those experienced users using V/e have opted out of having their edits tagged V/E, I'm assuming "gobs and gobs" are either on other language wikis, heavily skewed to a time of day I haven't sampled or big in number but still too small a proportion to account for the increase in the number of editors doing >100 edits per month. On 17 August 2015 at 15:54, Jonathan Morgan &lt;jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:jmorgan@wikimedia.org> > wrote: There are gobs and gobs* of people using VE. Many of them are experienced editors. I'm also interested in looking at VE adoption over time (especially by veteran editors). I'll sniff around and let y'all know if I find anything. No idea what might be causing the boost in active editor numbers. But it's exciting to see :) Anyone else have data that bears on these questions? - J *non-scientific estimate drawn from anecdata On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 9:53 AM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: That's an interesting theory, but are there many people actually using V/E now? I've just gone back through recent changes looking for people using it, and apart from half a dozen newbies I've welcomed I'm really not seeing many V/E edits. Looking at the history of Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&offset=&limit=500&action=history> the last 500 edits go back three months. So apart from the Interior, you and I Kerry I'm not sure there is a huge number of people testing it, and I wasn't testing it in the first 6 months of this year. I did see some research where they were claiming that retention rates for V/E editors were now as good as for people using the classic editor, but I would be surprised if there were enough people using V/E to make a difference to these figures, especially as this is about the editors doing over 100 edits a month. I agree it would be interesting to track the take-up of the VE (fully or partially) by editor by year of original signup. But I think the long awaited boost from V?E editing is yet to come, if the regulars have started to increase that is likely to be due to something else. Jonathan On 15 August 2015 at 15:11, Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com <mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> > wrote: Is there any way of telling what proportion of these 8% appear to be using the Visual Editor either exclusively or partially? It might be interesting to track the take-up of the VE (fully or partially) by editor by year of original signup. Kerry From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> ] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Saturday, 15 August 2015 11:12 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> >; The Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee mailing list &lt;rcom-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:rcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? Hi, With 8% more editors contributing over 100 edits in June 2015 than in <https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm> June 2014, we have now had six consecutive months where this particular metric of the core community is looking positive. One or two months could easily be a statistical blip, especially when you compare calender months that may have 5 weekends in one year and four the next. But 6 months in a row does begin to look like a change in pattern. As far as caveats go I'm aware of several of the reasons why raw edit count is a suspect measure, but I'm not aware of anything that has come in in this year that would have artificially inflated edit counts and brought more of the under 100 editors into the >100 group. I know there was a recent speedup, which should increase subsequent edit rates, and one of the edit filters got disabled in June, but neither of those should be relevant to the Jan-May period. Would anyone on this list be aware of something that would have otherwise thrown that statistic? Otherwise I'm considering submitting something to the Signpost. Regards Jonathan _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

Most of those editors will have done 33 edits or less using V/E, and some, including me in 4th place, will have been having a look at V/E after the attention it has had recently at Wikimania, on the signpost and on mailing lists. I'm not sure that something that barely involves 10% of a group of editors could have had such a big effect. More likely and just at the right time, late 2014, Erik Zachte has reminded me that we had a major speed-up with php parser change. If the data is correct, then that is likely to be one of the main reasons for the change. Regards Jonathan Cardy

I feel like I should expand on my skepticism of HHVM as a mechanism for the observed rise in active editors. The average edit takes 7 minutes[1,2]. HHVM reduces the time to *save* the edit by a couple seconds. 7 minutes - a couple seconds = ~7 minutes. So, HHVM doesn't really help you edit substantially faster. 1. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, February). Using edit sessions to measure participation in Wikipedia. In *Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work* (pp. 861-870). ACM. 2. Halfaker, A., Keyes, O., Kluver, D., Thebault-Spieker, J., Nguyen, T., Shores, K., ... & Warncke-Wang, M. (2015, May). User Session Identification Based on Strong Regularities in Inter-activity Time. In *Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web* (pp. 410-418). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 5:08 PM, Aaron Halfaker &lt;ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote:

Yes, percentage tells a very different story to absolute counts. Just looking at number of VE edits, I was in the top 10 with my 303 VE edits. But as a percentage, I came in about #98 with a mere 10% of my 3063 edits. If I had been asked to guess, I would have said about 25- 30% of my edits would VE, but I did a lot of housekeeping edits with AWB recently, which is dragging down my VE proportion which I think is probably closer to 30% when I am doing content creation. Raw numbers: Kerry Raymond 303 3063 9.8923 I have a number of reasons to keep using the source editor, but they all boil down to the same thing, a need to use “canned” or generated chunks of wikitext. These are always well-formed units of wikitext (tags closed, brackets balanced, etc) which presumably parse to significant non-terminals in the grammar, rather than “fragments” of wikitext which I realise could complicate matters. Speaking of which, can someone point me at the grammar for our wikitext? What are we dealing with? LL, LALR, LR, or (as I fear) something more hideous …? Kerry From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Thursday, 20 August 2015 8:50 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? For anyone who's still curious, here's[1] a set of all the editors who have made over 100 article edits on Enwiki in the past 30 days: their total article edits, total VE article edits, and the % of total made with VE. And the winner is... User:Hessamnia![2] 1. http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/4809 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20160101000000&limit=500&tagfilter=&contribs=user&target=Hessamnia&namespace=0> &offset=20160101000000&limit=500&tagfilter=&contribs=user&target=Hessamnia&namespace=0 On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 3:15 PM, Aaron Halfaker &lt;aaron.halfaker(a)gmail.com <mailto:aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> > wrote: I feel like I should expand on my skepticism of HHVM as a mechanism for the observed rise in active editors. The average edit takes 7 minutes[1,2]. HHVM reduces the time to *save* the edit by a couple seconds. 7 minutes - a couple seconds = ~7 minutes. So, HHVM doesn't really help you edit substantially faster. 1. Geiger, R. S., & Halfaker, A. (2013, February). Using edit sessions to measure participation in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 861-870). ACM. 2. Halfaker, A., Keyes, O., Kluver, D., Thebault-Spieker, J., Nguyen, T., Shores, K., ... & Warncke-Wang, M. (2015, May). User Session Identification Based on Strong Regularities in Inter-activity Time. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 410-418). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 5:08 PM, Aaron Halfaker &lt;ahalfaker(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:ahalfaker@wikimedia.org> > wrote: So, I've been digging into this a bit. Regretfully, I don't have my results written up in a nice, consumable format. So, you'll need to deal with my worklogs. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Active_editor_spike_2015/Work… TL;DR: It looks like there was a sudden burst in new registrations. Work by Neil Quinn of the Editing Team suggests that these new registrations were largely the result of changes to the mobile app. I didn't specifically look at 100+ monthly editors. That seems like a fine extension of the study. I'd be happy to support someone else to do that work. I have some datasets that should make it relatively easy. Correlation is not causation. There's no cause to arrive at this conclusion. In my limited study of the effects of HHVM on newcomer engagement, I found no meaningful effect. I think that, before we consider HHVM as a cause of this, we should at least propose a mechanism and look for evidence of that mechanism. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:HHVM_newcomer_engagement_experiment On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 10:49 AM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: Most of those editors will have done 33 edits or less using V/E, and some, including me in 4th place, will have been having a look at V/E after the attention it has had recently at Wikimania, on the signpost and on mailing lists. I'm not sure that something that barely involves 10% of a group of editors could have had such a big effect. More likely and just at the right time, late 2014, Erik Zachte has reminded me that we had a major speed-up with php parser change. <http://hhvm.com/blog/7205/wikipedia-on-hhvm> http://hhvm.com/blog/7205/wikipedia-on-hhvm If the data is correct, then that is likely to be one of the main reasons for the change. Regards Jonathan Cardy On 17 Aug 2015, at 19:11, Jonathan Morgan &lt;jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:jmorgan@wikimedia.org> > wrote: It looks like about 10% of highly active Enwiki editors have used VE in the past month (across all namespaces): http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/4795 On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 8:35 AM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: On a very non-scientific measure of how few editors currently use V/E, I took some snapshots of the most recent 500 mainspace edits <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&limit=500&days=30> yesterday and was getting circa 1% tagged as visual editor, I've just run two sample this afternoon and the first had not a single edit tagged Visual editor and the other only four, so unless some of those experienced users using V/e have opted out of having their edits tagged V/E, I'm assuming "gobs and gobs" are either on other language wikis, heavily skewed to a time of day I haven't sampled or big in number but still too small a proportion to account for the increase in the number of editors doing >100 edits per month. On 17 August 2015 at 15:54, Jonathan Morgan &lt;jmorgan(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:jmorgan@wikimedia.org> > wrote: There are gobs and gobs* of people using VE. Many of them are experienced editors. I'm also interested in looking at VE adoption over time (especially by veteran editors). I'll sniff around and let y'all know if I find anything. No idea what might be causing the boost in active editor numbers. But it's exciting to see :) Anyone else have data that bears on these questions? - J *non-scientific estimate drawn from anecdata On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 9:53 AM, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: That's an interesting theory, but are there many people actually using V/E now? I've just gone back through recent changes looking for people using it, and apart from half a dozen newbies I've welcomed I'm really not seeing many V/E edits. Looking at the history of Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&offset=&limit=500&action=history> the last 500 edits go back three months. So apart from the Interior, you and I Kerry I'm not sure there is a huge number of people testing it, and I wasn't testing it in the first 6 months of this year. I did see some research where they were claiming that retention rates for V/E editors were now as good as for people using the classic editor, but I would be surprised if there were enough people using V/E to make a difference to these figures, especially as this is about the editors doing over 100 edits a month. I agree it would be interesting to track the take-up of the VE (fully or partially) by editor by year of original signup. But I think the long awaited boost from V?E editing is yet to come, if the regulars have started to increase that is likely to be due to something else. Jonathan On 15 August 2015 at 15:11, Kerry Raymond &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com <mailto:kerry.raymond@gmail.com> > wrote: Is there any way of telling what proportion of these 8% appear to be using the Visual Editor either exclusively or partially? It might be interesting to track the take-up of the VE (fully or partially) by editor by year of original signup. Kerry From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> ] On Behalf Of WereSpielChequers Sent: Saturday, 15 August 2015 11:12 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> >; The Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee mailing list &lt;rcom-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:rcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? Hi, With 8% more editors contributing over 100 edits in June 2015 than in <https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm> June 2014, we have now had six consecutive months where this particular metric of the core community is looking positive. One or two months could easily be a statistical blip, especially when you compare calender months that may have 5 weekends in one year and four the next. But 6 months in a row does begin to look like a change in pattern. As far as caveats go I'm aware of several of the reasons why raw edit count is a suspect measure, but I'm not aware of anything that has come in in this year that would have artificially inflated edit counts and brought more of the under 100 editors into the >100 group. I know there was a recent speedup, which should increase subsequent edit rates, and one of the edit filters got disabled in June, but neither of those should be relevant to the Jan-May period. Would anyone on this list be aware of something that would have otherwise thrown that statistic? Otherwise I'm considering submitting something to the Signpost. Regards Jonathan _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)> _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

7 minutes is an average, yes? I would agree that an editor whose hundred edits represents about 700 minutes per month would not achieve much more in the same amount of time. But the editors who do over a hundred edits a month are significantly skewed towards the gnomes and vandal fighters who's editing rate is more like one a minute, and at that point saving a couple of seconds per edit becomes more significant. So not surprising that this appears to be a power user phenomena and not something that your 5 edits per month editor would notice. The other point is that not all time is equal. Time spent typing, searching is one thing, but time waiting for an edit to save is time the system is holding you back. So it makes total sense to me that speeding up the save time would improve the user experience for wiki gnomes and encourage them to do more. Content writers who might only save every half hour would barely notice the change unless they are working on larger articles where the speed up in save time is greater as it is proportionate to article size. Featured Articles do tend to be relatively large. Regards Jonathan Cardy

WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: The main thing I have questions about with that metric is whether it's a good proxy for editing activity in general, or is dominated by fluctuations in "bookkeeping" contributions, i.e. people doing mass-moves of categories and that kind of thing (which makes it quite easy to get to 100 edits). This has long been a complaint about edit counts as a metric, which have never really been solidly validated. Looking through my own personal editing history, it looks like there's an anti-correlation between hitting the 100-edit threshold and making more substantial edits. In months when I work on article-writing I typically have only 20-30 edits, because each edit takes a lot of library research, so I can't make more than one or two a day. In months where I do more bookkeeping-type edits I can easily have 500 or 1000 edits. But that's just for me; it's certainly possible that Wikipedia-wide, there's a good correlation between raw edit count and other kinds of desirable activity measures. But is there evidence of that? -- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.kmjn.org

"Until we can prove it is good data we should treat it as good data" is not how data works. Absent exactly that analysis it is almost certainly a bad idea for us to declare this to be good news; validate, /then/ celebrate. On 24 August 2015 at 12:26, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation

It would be interesting to have some coarse characterisation of edits to see if any growth in edit count is spread uniformly against all contribution types or if the growth is disproportionate some way. I would suspect that the change in the length of the article is probably a poor man’s approximation for the nature of the edit. Using the “generalisation from single example” method :) I took a look at my own recent contributions. As a rough characterisation …. An increase of over 200 bytes seems to equate to adding content in the form of new sentences, so likely to be new facts. And most edits in 100-200 extra bytes are content related (or at least added citations). Adding under 100 bytes seems to be more “housekeeping” of existing content. Nothing factually new, but I might be adding a section header, some wikilinks, copyediting, adding categories, etc Reductions in a small number of bytes 0-50 is most likely copyediting. Reductions by more than 50 bytes is usually deleting content (although it might be part of moving/merging process in which the content is actually preserved elsewhere, as I use section editing a lot in the source editor). Not being a deletionist, my larger deletions (where my intention is to remove the content entirely from WP) are usually pretty blatant vandalism or nonsense. Generally if I sense good faith, I try to see if I can fix it up rather than just chuck it out. As section blanking etc is usually dealt with by ClueBot and similar, I am rarely needing to restore large amounts of inexplicably deleted content. The above comments relate to articles rather than talk pages where different patterns apply. So I’d be curious to know if there’s any change to the proportion of (say) 200+ byte additions to articles (not talk, etc) over time, as I think that’s a reasonable indicator of new content rather than the maintenance of existing content. From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Tuesday, 25 August 2015 2:48 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Has the recent increase in English wikipedia's core community gone beyond a statistical blip? I don't think Jonathan was saying we should buy a full page adin the NYT and declare editor retention solved. I share his cautious optimism. The rate of the editor decline has decreased along several metrics, and we're seeing an intriguing uptick in 100+ editor activity. Back in 2011, when he and I (and several others on this list) were participating in the Summer of Research, the month-over-month metrics were decreasing at a rate that was kind of alarming. Some combination of factors seems to have changed that pattern. Worth looking into. J On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 9:35 AM, Oliver Keyes &lt;okeyes(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:okeyes@wikimedia.org> > wrote: "Until we can prove it is good data we should treat it as good data" is not how data works. Absent exactly that analysis it is almost certainly a bad idea for us to declare this to be good news; validate, /then/ celebrate. On 24 August 2015 at 12:26, WereSpielChequers &lt;werespielchequers(a)gmail.com <mailto:werespielchequers@gmail.com> > wrote: -- Oliver Keyes Count Logula Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l -- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>

Just a graph in case this is helpful: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Very_active_editors,_January-July,_… More graphs might help to further inform the conversation, such as graphs about VE edits. By the way, is there an easy way to get info on from https://stats.wikimedia.org about editor activity levels that excludes bots? It might also be nice to have tables on https://stats.wikimedia.org with VE editing statistics. Pine On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 12:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Thanks Nemo. Here's a new version of the highly active editors graph, plus some additional graphs for consideration: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Very_active_editors,_January-July,_… (note that the Commons preview may still show the old version, so download the full size image to see the updated version) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Very_active_editors,_January-July,_… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editors,_January-July,_2013,… https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Active_editors,_January-July,_2013,… Pine On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: