Wikipedia:English WP silent majority

There is a silent majority here on the English Wikipedia, a majority of editors who do not post messages to talk-pages, as well as editors who talk much less than editing the other pages of articles, templates, guidelines, etc. The monthly data counts collected for editor activity show that over two-thirds of active editors (the majority), per month, post mostly (or all) as article-update edits or template/help edits, rather than talk-page, or user-talk, or Wikipedia-talk, or template-talk (etc.) edits.

However, because the edit-summary lines can act as messages to other editors, then even editors who rarely edit talk-pages, directly, could be sending edit-summary messages and not be totally "silent" in a strict sense. So, the concept of the silent majority, for talk-pages, relates more to being silent about user-talk dialogues, opinion polls, open debates, ranks of priorities, or consensus-building discussions. Also, there is a loophole in talk-page accounting, where people who merely delete the messages, as posted by other editors, are counted as making talk-page edits, even though they are not posting messages and are actually silent in reply.

Size of silent majority over 74%/month

The number of "silent" editors is relative to the month, as measured from activity reports, because the editor-activity data, for talk-page edits, is typically tallied for each month separately. So, the data reveals the number of silent-each-month. Overall, the data for the months could be totalled and divided, as the average number of active editors silent-each-month.

Data from the monthly report, http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm, can be used to determine the silent editors. The simplest count of the "silent majority" can be found in comparing counts of editors who make 1 talk-page edit per month, versus editors who make 1 article edit per month, such as in March 2013:

30,257 talk-page edits, versus 116,321 article edits (only once in March 2013),
ratio: 26%, or 74% silent (86,064 usernames) with no talk-page edits in March 2013.

The ratio can be compared to prior months/years, such as March 2012:

30,966 talk-page edits, versus 112,863 article edits (March 2012, prior year),
ratio: 27%, or 73% silent (81,897 usernames) with no talk-page edits in March 2012.

The ratio for other months during the past 2 years has been similar.

Estimating the relative silence of editors

Beyond the one-edit activity, the level of silence is more difficult to determine because many editors with multiple article edits (3, 5, 10, 25, 250, etc.) might still have posted only 1 talk-page edit during the month, and technically not "silent" but almost. However, the monthly edit counts can be used to compare "relative silence" of multiple-edit levels, such as 5-edit levels in March 2013:  9,084 with 5+ talk-page edits, 33,243 with 5+ article edits (per month), ratio: 27%, or 73% more silent (24,159 people) with fewer than 5 talk-page edits in March 2013. The data gives only the "relative silence" because the count of 30,257 talk-page edits, versus the 33,243 with 5+ article edits, leaves only 2,986 (9%) who never posted a talk-page edit, as guaranteed silent, by mathematical elimination. Similar comparisons can be made for other multi-edit counts, such as to estimate the relative silence of editors who make 5 article edits per month.

• 33,243 5-article edits v. 30,257 1-talk edit, or 2,986 (9%) never talk
• 33,243 5-article edits v. 13,558 3-talk edits, or 19,685 (59%) not talking 3x
• 33,243 5-article edits v. 9,084 5-talk edits, or 33,243 (73%) not talking 5x
• 33,243 5-article edits v. 5,507 10-talk edits, or 27,736 (83%) not talking 10x

When higher monthly counts of article edits (25/100/250 edits) are compared, then many results of relative silence are similar. The trend seems to be that over 70% of editors are relatively silent (or less talkative) at the corresponding levels of article edits. In general, most editors update content pages over 2x more than post talk-page messages, as being relatively half-silent in their edits. Only 30% of editors seem to talk as much, or more, than updating the content.

Other perspectives

Other cross-comparisons, between monthly counts of talk-page edits and counts of article edits, could be used to show other related patterns of editor activity.

Again, people who mainly delete (or archive) the talk-page messages, posted by others, should be considered as an additional part of the silent majority, beyond the edit-activity ratios. Meanwhile, people who express many opinions in edit-summary lines could be excluded from the silent majority ratios which are based on talk-page edit levels, judged from a purist view of "silent" as providing no opinions, rather than the "silent majority" who do not participate in article-content discussions, open debates, or opinion polls, etc.

See also

• wp:Silence and consensus - essay warning people who are silent are ignored