Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-26/In focus
An increase in active Wikipedia editors
According to one possibly over-simplistic measure, the core Wikimedia community, and in particular the core community on the English Wikipedia, has recently stopped declining and might even have started to grow again.
| Month | 2014 | 2015 | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 3,232 | 3,312 | 80 |
| February | 2,957 | 3,051 | 94 |
| March | 3,131 | 3,309 | 178 |
| April | 2,979 | 3,156 | 177 |
| May | 3,051 | 3,223 | 172 |
| June | 2,981 | 3,245 | 264 |
| July | 3,024 | 3,399 | 375 |
| Month | 2014 | 2015 | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 10,331 | 10,625 | 294 |
| February | 9,508 | 9,779 | 287 |
| March | 9,936 | 10,446 | 510 |
| April | 9,533 | 9,986 | 453 |
| May | 9,689 | 10,075 | 386 |
| June | 9,276 | 9,891 | 615 |
| July | 9,420 | 10,280 | 860 |
For some years now the English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement generally have been losing active editors faster than they have been recruiting them.
But one interesting indicator has now started to climb and indicates that the core community may actually be growing again. Though a range of other indicators from the appointment of new admins on the English wikipedia, the number of new accounts created, and the number of editors doing more than five edits per month are still flat or in decline.
The number of editors saving more than 100 edits each month is a long-standing metric published about Wikipedia and other WMF projects. For seven consecutive months, from January to July 2015, that indicator has been positive on both the English Wikipedia community and the whole Wikimedia project—though the situation is more complex on some other sites, such as the German Wikipedia.
We know there are seasonal events that affect the community, and months themselves vary in length, so February 2015 was shorter than January or March; but more editors were contributing more than 100 edits that month than in February 2014; similarly, in January 2015 there were more active editors than in January 2014, a trend that has now run for seven months. Last month, 12,349 editors made more than 100 edits across all projects, 10,280 editors across all versions of Wikipedia, and 3,399 editors on the English Wikipedia, as opposed to 11,257, 9,420, and 3,024 editors respectively in July 2014.
The matter has been discussed on the research mailing list, Wiki-research-l, during the past two weeks.
As with any data over time, there is always the risk that this could just be anomalous, but Wikimedia Foundation data analyst Erik Zachte has now said of the phenomenon: "The growth seems real to me." Zachte has also pointed to the late 2014 speed-up of editing on the Wikimedia sites as a potential contributor to the increase. Implementing HHVM speeded up the saving of edits, which should logically have more impact on wiki gnomes doing lots of small edits than on editors who make just a few saves per hour.
Another theory suggested on the research list and elsewhere has attributed the increase to the improvements to Visual Editor, though with barely ten percent of the most active editors on English Wikipedia using it, it is unlikely to be a major or sole reason for the apparent increase.
The different leadership style of new Foundation executive director Lila Tretikov may be bearing fruit, in terms of better relations between the Foundation and the most active editors.
There is also some concern that Editors saving over 100 edits per month is a simplistic metric; for example, it will include users of highly automated tools such as AutoWikiBrowser, STiki, or Huggle who may achieve that edit count in less than an hour per month, but omits an editor who spends an evening every week writing or rewriting one or two articles, but who might only save an edit every half an hour in that evening.
Should the trend continue, and assuming that someone doesn't find a software bug that has caused the anomaly, future lines of analysis could include examining how much of the increase is due to fewer editors leaving, more inactive editors returning, more new editors joining, and a greater number of casual editors increasing their editing frequency to more than 100 edits per month.
August figures are expected in about a month. It will be very interesting to see whether the trend continues.
Discuss this story
The Meme of decline
Edits per article, Wikipedians per article
A nice piece: the downward trend had been showing signs of reversing for a while.
One thing to bear in mind though is that the number of edits per article has clearly declined. In March 2007 there were 4.8 million edits spread across 1.6 million articles (about 3 edits per article). In March 2015, there were 3.1 million edits spread across 4.8 million articles (about 0.6 edits per article).
So articles as a whole are stabilising. In some cases, this may be because they have matured and become really good (I believe featured articles for example generally see fewer edits) or "good enough", in other cases it may just be a question of fatigue on the part of editors who used to fight over content – then you get articles that look like abandoned battlefields (I can think of a few).
In addition, new articles added see fewer edits than they used to in the past – possibly because they are in niche topics, with shorter content and fewer people interested in them.
What has also sharply declined, of course, is the number of highly active Wikipedians per article. This has potential implications for quality control. For example, hundreds of thousands of articles are on no active editor's watchlist. Andreas JN466 14:32, 28 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Something that brought me back
I had really slowed down my content editing up until about 1 month ago, largely because I am working for the Foundation on WP:TWL, but also burnout. I know the meta:100wikidays challenge has helped me feel more tied to coming back to contributing (and contributing content). I have noticed an increase in the number of similar collegial activities in the last couple years: whereas when I really burnt out and backed off in 2012/13, those were nearly as accessable. I wonder if we should be encouraging more editing contests, to keep people engaged (there is even a tool kit for running such events being worked on, based on community learnings). On English we don't have as many of these kinds of spaces as we could (geographically focused language communities tend to do it better), Sadads (talk) 17:03, 28 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wikiprojects are ghost towns
I quit editing a while back, maybe 5 years. Trying to make Abe Lincoln an FA broke my will to edit. I've been checking my watchlist daily for the a last few weeks now, though. I see some of the same people around still active, like Black Kite and BOZ. I miss the editors from the old inclusionist/deletionist wars we used to have who aren't around anymore, like Ned Scott and Matthew. Win or lose, I don't think WP has ever had anything as addictive as that particular fight. Now it's over.
Anyways, I still have a bunch of wikiproject pages on my watchlist, but they barely ever come up anymore. WProject comics used to have maybe 10 comments a day. Now it's a few a week. Same with the rest. Things are way less active than they used to be. But, I'm back, doing a little bit here and there, though. Maybe we hit rock bottom and will start moving up. I think wikinews never came back, though, as an example, so who knows. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 03:07, 3 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The trend continues for August
August stats are in and the trend continues. I'm starting to monitor this at User:WereSpielChequers/100+ editors ϢereSpielChequers 17:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wishful thinking
We have years of decline, then one indicator goes contrary. If it is reflective of anything it is the bad actors beginning their steady march. As another editor mentions above WikiProjects have mostly failed. Barnstars and WikiLove are nice and all but they have nothing to do with the integrity of the project. - Shiftchange (talk) 07:21, 5 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]