Research:Newbie reverts and subsequent editing behavior

This page documents a completed research project.


Question

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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

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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

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All Editors and All Namespaces

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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%

Editors in Namespaces 0 and 1 (Article and Article::Talk)

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Summary

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

Future work

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References

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