Research:Editor classes

WSoR 2011

Contact

Zack Exley

This page documents a completed research project.

Topic

The Editor Trends Study showed that the number of active editors (editors making at least 5 edits a month) on many of the top Wikipedia projects is in decline. This sprint is intended to build on the findings of that study to include different "classes" of editors: those in the 1-9, 10-99, 100-999, 1000-9999, and 10,000+ edit ranges. How has the recruitment of editors who go on to make a significant contribution to the project changed over the years? Are there fewer heavy editors or fewer casual editors recruited since 2007?

Process

We took the number of editors on the English Wikipedia from years 2011 to either 2010 or the present (including 2011 may produce a misleading appearance of further decline, since the year is not complete) and divided them up by those from each month who would go on to make 1-9, 10-99, 100-999, 1000-9999, and 10000+ edits in their first year as a Wikipedian, starting from the date of their first edit.

This does not address retention of different ages or classes of editors at all, but instead demonstrates how many new editors who join the project become very active Wikipedians.

Results and discussion

By charting the number of editors who would go on to make a certain amount (1-9, 10-99, 100-999, 1000-9999, or 1000+) of edits in their first year of editing, we discovered marked differences between editor classes.

English

While the recruitment of new Wikipedians in the 1-9 and 10-99 classes began to decline in 2007, the year indicated by the Editor Trends Study for the outflow of new editors, heavier editors were being recruited less and less into the project starting in 2006 and their numbers have been dropping much more dramatically each year than the other editing classes.

This suggests that a decline in very active editor recruitment preceded the overall decline in retention of new editors, and that Wikipedia is not recruiting heavy editors at nearly the same numbers as light and moderate editors. Given the findings of other sprints, which indicate that many important activities on Wikipedia such as new page patrol and vandal-fighting follow a power law curve (where most of the work is done by the small fraction of top heavy-duty editors), the sharper decline in recruitment of very active English Wikipedians demonstrates an even greater potential challenge for the health and growth of the project.

EN Wikipedians by year who made n edits in their first year
Year	1-9 edits	10-99 edits	100-999 edits	1,000-9,999 edits	10,000+ edits
2001	414	120	90	25	0
2002	998	501	248	115	4
2003	4927	2377	887	293	29
2004	24623	11295	3587	1058	72
2005	104113	39572	11041	2822	169
2006	512037	130223	21591	3926	239
2007	747853	130706	14807	2231	148
2008	678789	105564	11042	1603	105
2009	645375	96021	9693	1219	68
2010	588566	84187	7728	902	44
2011	277079	35639	2678	165	2

Russian and German

Similar trends hold true when you look at projects such as German, even on a different time scale, such as here where we measured amount of edits in the first 3 months of participation. Note however that there is only a very slight decline in recruitment for these two editor classes in Russian, though retention trends in Russian may still be in decline.

Future work

Using Toolserver, the same data as above has been generated for all language projects of Wikipedia other than English, and needs to be charted and shared.