[WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

Thu Jun 22 00:19:42 UTC 2006

On 6/20/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> It seems to me that there should be some relatively straightforward
> facts and figures that could be dug out of the edit history database on
> this. Perhaps a graph of the average age of deleted articles would do
> for a start; a drop in speedy deletion compared to other forms of
> deletion should result in an increase in the average age of articles
> upon deletion.

Unfortunately the data at stats.wikimedia.org seems somewhat spotty.
New user data for en seems to cut out after Jan 2006
(http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm) and ditto
with new articles per day
(http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm). There
does not seem to be a count for deleted articles per day on there at
all.

This seems to indicate to me that getting statistics for this period
is going to be a considerably harder job. I'm sure it has been
discussed why the en stats died then, but it would be nice to politely
nudge whoever has the power to deal with this and remind them that
these numbers could actually be useful for more than bragging about
whether we've created our Nth article...

If we had the following stats, some interesting conclusions could
probably be drawn:
1. New users per time period (day, week, month, whatever)
2. Articles created by new users (defining new user as someone with
under X number of edits or an account which is only X days old) per
time period
3. Number of those articles which were deleted with the first X days
4. Number of those articles which ended up on AfD (and maybe whether
they were eventually deleted or not)

I don't know how hard it would be to make the database spit out
numbers on things like that, but it should in theory be possible...

FF