[Wikipedia-l] Re: Most active users

Wed Sep 18 20:15:29 UTC 2002

LDC wrote
>Andre wrote;
>> I wanted to see who is the most active contributor
>> at the moment. To do so, I counted (or rather, had
>> the database count) the numbers of edits per 
>> registered user.

>I should point out that this only counts edits made 
> since the installation of Magnus's Phase II 
> software, so it somewhat undercounts those who 
> contributed to the project in its early days, such 
> as Larry Sanger, me, Tim Shell, Magnus, and probably
> a few others.

Yeah it would be nice to have /somebody/ who is even
close to me :) (although adding the extra month would
also add a couple hundred more edits to my total too).
It should be noted that the majority of my edits are
rather minor (minor NPOVing, minor adds, wikification
and formatting mostly). I don't know how useful having
a list of most active contributors would be though -
our focus shouldn't be on number of edits but on the
quality of individual articles (which really can't be
measured by any SQL query).

There will always be people like me who feel they need
to do grunt work to make the whole encyclopedia look
and feel like a coherent whole. I would spend more
time on fewer articles (I have a /huge/ backlog of
notes and material to contribute) but since others are
doing that so well I spend much of my time doing what
many people don't like to do because it is boring or
otherwise not fun. If this work gets largely done
without me then I will switch to concentrating my
contributions to fewer articles (something I've been
wanting to do for some time now anyway -- there are
/many/ areas in biology, chemistry and geology that
need better coverage). In short, there are many
different ways to contribute to Wikipedia and a list
of most active users really only highlights Recent
Changes junkies like me. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)   

PS to Andre; I'm not going anywhere but as my user
page states I have had to significantly cut-back my
contributions due to simultaneous full-time work and
full-time school. In fact, I have been concentrating
my contributions of late toward the element and orders
of magnitude articles. Of course I still wikify,
WikiFormat and check for copyright violations in many
articles every other day or so. I'll be back into the
full swing of things as soon as winter break arrives. 

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