Research:Active editor spike 2015
Duration: 2015-03 – 2015-04
This graph[1] shows a spike. What is it?
Results
editTrend analysis
editI generated seasonal decomposition plots for a number of large wikis. The data is based on active editor data generated from the databases (see the db definition used here).
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German Wikipedia -
English Wikipedia -
Spanish Wikipedia -
French Wikipedia -
Italian Wikipedia -
Dutch Wikipedia -
Russian Wikipedia
Year-over-year comparison
edit| size | January | February | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| total ae | yoy change | yoy prop change | total ae | yoy change | yoy prop change | |
| large | 52253 | 2761 | 0.0528 | 49752 | 1892 | 0.0380 |
| medium | 50333 | 480 | 0.0095 | 46438 | 2001 | 0.0431 |
| small | 22602 | -248 | -0.0110 | 19827 | 1603 | 0.0808 |
Year-over-year change by wiki strata. This table presents the change in the overall count of active editors for wikis in three strata (large > 10k ae, 1k <= medium <= 10k & small < 1k).
Editor model breakdown
edit
All projects. The number of monthly active editors is plotted for the months between Aug 2013 and Feb 2015 for All Wikimedia Wikis.
Large wikis. The number of monthly active editors is plotted for the months between Aug 2013 and Feb 2015 for Large Wikimedia Wikis (> 5k active & not Wikidata).
Wikidata. The number of monthly active editors is plotted for the months between Aug 2013 and Feb 2015 for WikiData
Medium wikis. The number of monthly active editors is plotted for the months between Aug 2013 and Feb 2015 for Large Wikimedia Wikis (1k-5k active).
Small wikis. The number of monthly active editors is plotted for the months between Aug 2013 and Feb 2015 for Small Wikimedia Wikis (< 1k active).
Summary
editThe main takeaways are the following:
- the spike appears to be real, to the best of our understanding it's not an artifact in the data as it was independently reproduced via different sources;
- January 2015 was the strongest month for English Wikipedia since June 2013;
- December 2014 was the first December ever (i.e. since 2001) not showing the typical seasonal drop (in fact in 2014 we had more active editors in December than in November, which is unusual);
- after removing the seasonal component, the resulting trend indicates that in 2014 the English WIkipedia decline slowed down and flattened;
- the spike seems to be present across many wikis (including Wikidata);
- it seems to affect many active editor groups (new, old & reactivated);