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Seeking recent editor stratification research
Does anybody know of recent work that updates the findings of m:Research:Editor classes or strategy:Editor Trends Study? I have poked around a bit but haven't found anything that works on the same issues; stats.wikimedia.org doesn't quite get into those issues AFAICT. Doesn't need to be formal research; I'd be interested in anything that people have found from just tooling around on toolserver or diving in the dumps. -- Visviva (talk) 18:06, 20 July 2022 (UTC)
As an update, I have been doing some initial poking around in the latest stub-meta-history dump. One thing that jumps out at me is that something odd was happening in 2014: that year saw a dramatic jump in new users in the 1-9 mainspace edits band (>70k absolute, >15% YoY), but also saw sharp drops in the absolute number of edits being made by editors in the 1k-9k and 10k+ mainspace-edit bands (which were largely reversed in subsequent years). I looked through the Signpost archives but didn't see anything that would indicate a titanic shift in wiki practice that year. But I wasn't very active at that time, so I don't really know what might have been happening that would have made 2014 special. Any ideas? -- Visviva (talk) 21:38, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
- Interesting work. The only thing I can think of re 2014 was that it was the first full year when both the VisualEditor and the notifications feature were enabled, though I'm not sure how much effect either of these things might have had. Mobile viewing and editing were becoming more popular as indicated by this, but once again, that probably wasn't a seismic shift. Graham87 08:42, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- Ooh, thanks, good thought. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense: barriers to editing come down so long-tail activity picks up, while "power users" get annoyed and their activity drops. (I recall having some rather cranky things to say about the VisualEditor myself, although my power user days were long behind me at that point.) And that same annoyance could explain the subsequent reversion to trend: annoyed power users make changes to policy and practice that push the balance back toward exclusion. Will be interesting to see if this holds once I've cleaned up the data a little better. -- Visviva (talk) 22:09, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Visviva, is that the all-wikis database? If so, then I believe you will see a quite dramatic effect at the Portuguese Wikipedia, which (if memory serves) had unusually stringent CAPTCHA rules in place until December 2013. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Whatamidoing (WMF): I've never heard of a database dump for all wikis and I can't find it on the relevant page. Can you point me to such a thing if it exists? Graham87 05:34, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- I don't know how the dumps are arranged. I just saw on the page that there were 16,666,393 pages in the mainspace, which is 10 million more than our current 6,562,850 mainspace articles, and it sounded approximately plausible to me as the number of articles if you added all the Wikipedias together. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:09, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- It's just the EN database. I believe 16.7M is accurate as the approximate total number of pages in mainspace (i.e. including redirects and other very short pages that NUMBEROFARTICLES excludes.) I found a version of that number ... uh, somewhere ... that jibed with my result, which was a nice feeling at the time -- although now I can't seem to find it. -- Visviva (talk) 22:00, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- It's at Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace. We have a grand total of about 59,000,000 articles on all Wikipedias. Graham87 12:53, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Whatamidoing (WMF): I've never heard of a database dump for all wikis and I can't find it on the relevant page. Can you point me to such a thing if it exists? Graham87 05:34, 26 July 2022 (UTC)
- @Visviva, is that the all-wikis database? If so, then I believe you will see a quite dramatic effect at the Portuguese Wikipedia, which (if memory serves) had unusually stringent CAPTCHA rules in place until December 2013. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
- Ooh, thanks, good thought. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense: barriers to editing come down so long-tail activity picks up, while "power users" get annoyed and their activity drops. (I recall having some rather cranky things to say about the VisualEditor myself, although my power user days were long behind me at that point.) And that same annoyance could explain the subsequent reversion to trend: annoyed power users make changes to policy and practice that push the balance back toward exclusion. Will be interesting to see if this holds once I've cleaned up the data a little better. -- Visviva (talk) 22:09, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
- In case any of my fellow randos wander across this conversation, I'll note for posterity that after removing bots, there is still something of an anomaly, but it can be further qualified by two things: (1) the increase in long-tail registered user edits was only a small fraction of the decrease in IP edits during the same year, so it may just reflect an interface change that nudged people away from anonymous editing; (2) with bots removed, it is clearer that the drop in power user activity in the four-digit band was a continuation of a long-term downward trend from 2007 to 2014 (subsequently partially reversed), while the five-digit band didn't really move much (this was obscured by the 2013 surge in bot activity in relation to the transition of interwiki links to Wikidata, which made 2014 look like a sharp drop). There were clearly some significant shifts happening around 2014, but exactly what they were remains unclear to me. -- Visviva (talk) 18:23, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
Updated contributor study?
Howdy hello folks. A friend had been telling me about how male dominated the open source community is, and it made me look up the gender breakdown of Wikipedians. As far as I could tell, our data is almost comically outdated at this point: the most recent data is from 2013, when we were 84% male (see Wikipedia:Wikipedians). Does anyone know of any more recent data? If not, anyone know how we could get that number updated? I think it would be very good to track our progress (or lack thereof) of diversifying the community. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 19:27, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
- Hi CaptainEek, thanks for drawing attention to this. A couple of recent sources:
- The Community Insights survey 2021 report (paragraph 3 of the linked section)
- The 2019 Surveys on the gender of editors of English, Arabic, and Norwegian-language Wikipedias
- However, there are many more. For some lists of data sources on the gender breakdown of Wikipedians:
- The Gender Gap section on meta has a nice list of research by year
- As well as the Taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps for Wikimedia Projects (meta page for this project)
- I hope this helps a bit! -TAndic (WMF) (talk) 10:34, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
- Executive Summary: It hasn't changed much, and 84% is actually "better" than many figures. But as far as I'm aware, there's no research that produces by gender figures for actually useful edits, rather than fiddling with templates, navboxes, and short descriptions, surely predominately male activities. I've long suspected that the female contribution to additions of actual prose is a good deal higher than the figures suggest. Johnbod (talk) 03:53, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- I suspect it also contributes to the gender bias here, where more articles are about males than females. Women in Red tries to fix this. All I can suggest is to keep that in the back of your mind as you create new articles and look for interesting/notable females about which we can create articles! Oaktree b (talk) 16:52, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Insects, athletes?
Has anyone else noticed, in the course of magnanimously contributing editing ideas to random WP articles, that insects and athletes seem to outnumber everything else on Earth? – AndyFielding (talk) 11:34, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
- Easy to resolve, just feed the insects to the athletes (or perhaps vice versa). Blueboar (talk) 11:42, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
- Well, at least in terms of insects, they DO outnumber everything on earth. Over 50% of all described eukaryotes...are insects. As J.B.S. Haldane is said to have noted versions of on several occasions, "the Creator, if he exists, has a special preference for beetles." It would appear it's their planet, we just live on it... --Jayron32 17:38, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
- Or, it used to be theirs: The decline in insect populations is pretty scary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:47, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
- Also, note the qualification of "described eukaryotes". Prokaryotic lifeforms are, and always have been, much more numerous. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:37, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation English fundraising campaign - further pre-test dates
Dear community members,
I wanted to give you a quick update on further pre-test dates around the English campaign (see my previous message for more background).
As part of the English campaign we test our infrastructure on a regular basis throughout the next few months. Currently I can share with you when we will be running banner tests in August.
In August we will be running short banner tests for a few hours on the 3rd and 8th of August. We will add more August dates as the month progresses and I will inform you here, once we know more about the next testing phase. These tests mean that you might see banners, if you are logged out of your Wikipedia account.
Generally, before and during the campaign, you can contact us:
- On the talk page of the fundraising team
- If you need to report a bug or technical issue, please create a phabricator ticket
- If you see a donor on a talk page, VRT or social media having difficulties in donating, please refer them to donatewikimedia.org
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks you and regards,
Julia JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 07:48, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
- Dear all,
- I wanted to let you know about further testing we are doing for the English campaign in August.
- In order to gain insights from a more representative sample of readers, we are planning a 1 week, low-traffic test. During the test, a banner will only be shown to anonymous/non-logged-in users 5% of the time until the maximum of 10 impressions (1 big and 9 small banners) is reached. This test will run from the 8th - 15th of August. We also have a further three hour test on the 18th of August.
- I will continue to inform you here about test dates. If you have any questions, please address them to our talk page.
- Thank you and regards, JBrungs (WMF) (talk) 06:07, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Central discussion on editor retention and recruitment?
I periodically see comments, essays and articles about Wikipedia's desire to retain and recruit editors (e.g. Why Aren’t There More Wikipedia Editors? and WP:Why is Wikipedia losing contributors). I am wondering if there is a single location here or at Meta-Wiki for discussion of the issue. Thanks. — AjaxSmack 03:33, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Editor Retention might be of interest. -- Visviva (talk) 03:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I don't know how my search failed to turn up that obvious one. — AjaxSmack 04:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- As someone who's been involved with the retention project from the start, I didn't bring it up initially, because in truth the discussion page may not have the right mix of active page watchers to collaborate on new initiatives. There's no harm in starting a discussion there, though, and followup discussions can be brought to another venue if necessary. isaacl (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I don't know how my search failed to turn up that obvious one. — AjaxSmack 04:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
A Wikipedia creation page service
Hi there,
I'm a french wikipedian, so excuse me for my bad english. This afternoon (GMT time) I discover an commercial spam for a wikipedian page creator named Wikiproficiency ( dot com). As it is a company that work on english pages, I think you appreciate to meet them. If you need more precision, don't hesitate to ask me. Soon, --Gpesenti (talk) 14:55, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hello. More info here: Bulletin des patrouilleurs. There is for instance a list of articles on en. on which they claim to have contributed. VateGV ◦ Discuss? ◦ Discuter ? ◦ 15:00, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Always take these lists with a grain of salt. These marketers are notorious for falsely claiming responsibility for articles. BD2412 T 15:14, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Well this analysis looks accurate givent the results of the sockpuppet investigations on fr. VateGV ◦ Discuss? ◦ Discuter ? ◦ 15:32, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- Always take these lists with a grain of salt. These marketers are notorious for falsely claiming responsibility for articles. BD2412 T 15:14, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
- I've seen these pop up every so often. It's too hard to try and shut them down, they pop up again on another website. Easiest is to debate articles in AfD (Articles for Discussion/Deletion) where we can discuss why or why not an article should get deleted. Oaktree b (talk) 16:47, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Ken C Griffin "Mayonnaise incident".
I was just wondering if we could add the Mayonnaise incident to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin aswell as the recent news of his supoponea? I know wikipedia only includes factual evidence and so if anyone at the event would be able to vouch it would be great. I know other people's articles have this sort of thing but the story looks legit aswell as the subopena (tesla subopena), is 100% facutal. https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/n8tvrx/my_friend_had_dinner_with_kenny_g/ Nexxotic (talk) 03:51, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- Shall we count the policies that would violate? Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Biographies of Living Persons, Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is Not, for starters. - Donald Albury 15:29, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- I personally vote we skip with the formality of adding that the man does not share his mayonnaise, according to renowned historian and journalist niandra__lades7, and move to have him publicly executed. Iazyges Consermonor Opus meum 15:08, 5 August 2022 (UTC)