[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

Mon Mar 28 00:27:12 UTC 2011

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 14:18, Ting Chen <tchen at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update [2], and the editor
> trends study itself [3]. It is a deeply important topic, and each report
> is only a few pages long. ...
>
> The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing
> our movement. ...
>
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/March_25-26
> [2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update
> [3] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
> [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update
>

Hi Ting,

One of the things I wondered about the editor trends study is whether
it focused only on user names, as opposed to people.

It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble
successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the
English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a
year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new
editors were still active a year after their first edit."

A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts
after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new
identities, sometimes multiple ones. Any regular editor will tell you
that this happens a lot, for various reasons. Accounts are banned;
privacy is compromised; people acquire a certain reputation with an
account and want to start over; or they want a break from being User
X, for whatever reason, and become User Y for a while.

Did the study do anything to correlate number of accounts with number of people?

Sarah