Research:Newbie reverts and subsequent editing behavior

WSoR 2011

Contact

Shawn Walker

University of Washington

Wikimedia Foundation

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Research:Projects

This page documents a completed research project.

Question

Is a newbie particularly affected by having their first revision reverted? Of the editors whose first edits were reverted, yet they stayed, what is their subsequent editing behavior in the next 300 days? (RQ1.5)

• Did the number of editors who had their first edit reverted change during the years 2005-2009?
• Has their retention rate changed over time?

Methods

To answer this research question, the following data was generated for each year (2005-2009) via a series of queries to the Wikilytics database.:

• A list of editors who made their first edit in each year.
• The number of edits each editor made in the first 24 hours and subsequent 30, 90, 180, and 300 days from their first edit.
• Each editor's first edit was compared with a revision table to determine if it had been reverted.

Results and discussion

All Editors and All Namespaces

Percentage of editors retained during their first 300 days. Editors who had their first edit reverted compared to those who did not.

Editors retained by year (first edit not reverted)

Year	New Editors	30 days		90 days		180 days		300 days
		#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%
2005	142,202	55,515	39.0%	34,399	24.2%	35,130	24.7%	36,867	25.9%
2006	573,855	183,507	32.0%	100,924	17.6%	96,777	16.9%	93,178	16.2%
2007	74,0843	202,112	27.3%	88,906	12.0%	75,500	10.2%	70,140	9.5%
2008	646,093	160,889	24.9%	65,226	10.1%	54,110	8.4%	49,556	7.7%
2009	383,479	86,515	22.6%	35,315	9.2%	29,505	7.7%	27,482	7.2%

Editors retained by year (first edit reverted)

Year	New Editors	30 days		90 days		180 days		300 days
		#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%
2005	13,677	3,547	25.9%	1,692	12.4%	1,525	11.2%	1,561	11.4%
2006	87,024	20,891	24.0%	7,987	9.2%	7,163	8.2%	6,367	7.3%
2007	145,464	29,791	20.5%	8,807	6.1%	6,767	4.7%	5,864	4.0%
2008	14,4927	27,810	19.2%	7,568	5.2%	5,754	4.0%	4,876	3.4%
2009	81,312	14,971	18.4%	4,102	5.0%	2,992	3.7%	2,623	3.2%

Summary

• Editor retention has been decreasing over time.
• The negative effect of a revert has increased over time.