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14 March 2011

News and notes
Foundation reports editor trends, technology plans and communication changes; brief news
In the news
Paying US$1,000 to correct a Wikipedia error; brief news
Features and admins
The best of the week
Arbitration report
New case on AE sanction handling; AUSC candidates; proposed decision in Kehrli 2 and Monty Hall problem
Technology report
Left-aligned edit links and bugfixes abound; brief news
Editcountitis
Report on Editcountitis. 27% of all edits have been done by just 4,000 editors
 

2011-03-14

Foundation reports editor trends, technology plans and communication changes

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By Tilman Bayer and WereSpielChequers

Citing editor statistics, Foundation presents upcoming product plans

Age (in "wiki-years") of editors who made at least 50 edits in 2010
"The beginning of the retention drop [red] in 2005 coincides with the explosion of active editors [blue]."

The Wikimedia Foundation's "Editor Trends Study" (commissioned in October "to help better understand the internal dynamics of our communities") was published last week. The summary lists five "early conclusions:":

In a letter to Wikimedians ("March 2011 Update", advertised via CentralNotice – the English version has so far received over 18000 views), the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner presented the study's results, interpreting them as follows:

She then went on to name "Openness Begets Participation" as a strategy to solve the problem ("I believe we need to make editing fun again for everybody: both new editors and experienced editors. ... Quality and openness go hand in hand"), and outlined "The Year Ahead", based on the Foundation's "Product Whitepaper" (Signpost coverage, "a comprehensive analysis of our product priorities" based on its 2010–15 strategic plan (with "product" being defined as "technology through which people receive and develop Wikimedia content"). The following priorities were named, some of them comprising already ongoing efforts:

  1. Create a visual editor
  2. Improve the newbie experience
  3. Support community growth in developing countries
  4. Serve audiences on all devices
  5. Create a delightful experience for contributing and reviewing multimedia
The 4,000 most active Wikipedians compared to the rest of the EN Wikipedia community as of March 2, 2011.
Edit distribution for the 4,000 most active Wikipedians (previous research indicates that might satisfy a power law)

In related news, Kevin Rutherford recently analyzed the edit numbers of the most active editors on the English Wikipedia (by edit count), concluding that 27% of all edits have been done by a core group of 4,000 editors. In the last three years the number of edits needed to get onto List of 4,000 Wikipedians who have done the most edits rose from 5,000 edits to 11,426. Since the start of last year the number of editors breaking the 100,000 barrier has jumped by more than half, from 68 to 109, whilst the number of editors who have contributed over 200,000 edits has doubled from ten to twenty. This prompted a proposal to broaden the list from the 4,000 editors with the highest edit count to 5,000. So as of 9 March 2011, all editors with 9,168 edits or more are on the latest list (though some have opted out of being named).

Foundation staff: New positions for "Movement Communications" and data analysis, chief officer leaving

Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation posted a job opening for a Movement Communications Manager, a new position (reporting to the Head of Communications, currently Jay Walsh), whose purpose will be to "serve the Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Foundation staff by increasing the quantity and quality of communications between and among the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community." The list of job duties, apart from those concerning the communication of the achievements of Wikimedia projects to an external audience, also indicates planned changes to the interaction between the Foundation and volunteers:

Another job opening was posted for a Data Analyst and Researcher‎ who "on a day-to-day basis ... will create, mine and analyze data to help understand readers and editors of different Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia, across different geographies", and based on them create "reports, charts, graphs, maps and tables" to "concisely, clearly and meaningfully convey information for a lay audience, Wikimedia community and the foundation."

Outgoing CFOO Veronique Kessler

In other staff news, Veronique Kessler, who has been the Foundation's Chief Financial and Operating Officer (CFOO) since February 2008, announced she will leave for family reasons at the end of June, after completing the development of the 2011–12 business plan.

Briefly

2011-03-14

Paying US$1,000 to correct a Wikipedia error; brief news



Reader comments

2011-03-14

The best of the week

New featured picture: User:AngMoKio's photograph of a racing greyhound in full flight. The image was shot with a Canon EOS 40D, shutter speed 1/1000 s, aperture 8, ISO number 400, and focal length 85 mm.
This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 5 – Friday 11 March


Administrators

New featured picture: a Swallow-tailed Gull (Creagrus furcatus), the only fully nocturnal gull and seabird in the world.
New featured picture: Marine Iguana, found only on one island in the Galapagos
The week saw no new admins. At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: JaGa, due to finish Wednesday 16 March and My76Strat, due to finish Tuesday 15 March.


There were no new featured articles. Two featured articles were delisted:


Five images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":


Schubert's autograph of the Octet in F (D.803)
  • Schubert's Octet D803 (nom) (related article), composed in 1824 and of almost an hour's duration. Here, it is performed on period instruments by Monica Hugget (director and violin 1), Rob Diggins (violin 2), Vicki Gunn (viola), Sarah Freiberg (cello), Curtis Daily (double bass), William McColl (clarinet), RJ Kelley (horn), and Charles Kaufmann (bassoon).
Adagio – Allegro
Adagio
Scherzo
Andante
Menuetto
Andante Molto – Allegro
Presto

A map created by Fallschirmjäger won high praise from the reviewers last week, when we had little room to spare at F and A. We don't see many featured maps, so we've taken the unusual step of displaying it this week.



Reader comments

2011-03-14

New case on AE sanction handling; AUSC candidates; proposed decision in Kehrli 2 and Monty Hall problem

The Committee opened one new case during the week. Four cases are currently open.

Open cases

Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AE sanction handling) (Week 1)

This case will review the handling of AE sanctions (including the classification, imposition and reversal of such sanctions, the relevant processes, and whether administrators who regularly work in this area are appropriately receptive to feedback from uninvolved users). The case will also examine concerns about the conduct of certain editors in the pseudoscience topic area - a topic area which was subject to an arbitration case in 2006. During the week, 61 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence by 11 editors.

Rodhullandemu (Week 2)

During the week, another 28 kilobytes of content was submitted as on-wiki evidence, while proposals were also submitted in the workshop.

During the week, another 5 kilobytes of content was submitted as on-wiki evidence, while several comments were also submitted in the workshop. Yesterday, drafter Elen of the Roads submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include rulings concerning four editors, as well as a discretionary sanctions scheme.

Kehrli 2 (Week 5)

During the week, drafter David Fuchs submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include a ruling concerning a single editor.

Motion

An interim motion was passed: a case which was accepted and titled as "Ebionites 2" has been put on hold to permit mediation to proceed. On 5 April 2011, or earlier if the mediation is closed as unsuccessful, the Committee will reexamine the situation to determine whether the case should be opened or dismissed.

Other

AUSC

Seeking to appoint at least three non-arbitrator members to the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) (cf. Signpost coverage), the Committee released the names of the candidates being considered for these positions.

The six candidates being actively considered for these positions are:

The Community may pose questions to the candidates, and submit comments about the candidates on the individual nomination subpages (or privately via email to arbcom-en-b@lists.wikimedia.org) until 23:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC). The Community has been invited to review the candidates' nomination statements, the questions that have been posed to the candidates, as well as the answers (if any) that the candidates have provided.

Reader comments

2011-03-14

Left-aligned edit links and bugfixes abound; brief news

The change in design currently being tested

Historically, the links for editing individual sections of a page have been aligned to the right hand side of the page, distancing them from the sections to which they refer. At the same time, having left-aligned edit links next to each header has been an available gadget on the English Wikipedia. In 2009, the Wikimedia Usability Initiative suggested making the left-aligned variant the default for all users, but although Wikia switched over and reported an increase in section editing the change was never implemented on WMF wikis.

In renewed efforts to increase the number of editors on Wikimedia projects, on 9 March the Foundation's usability and engineering departments began a joint week-long study of the editing impact of any switch to left-aligned edit links. To achieve this, they began to collect anonymous click data from readers, some of whom will be temporarily switched to the left-aligned style. If successful, this test could prove to be the first of many such experiments (Wikimedia Techblog). Developer on the project Trevor Parscal added that the current tests would be strictly quantitative and would be "followed up with additional research that will better assess the more subtle effects of such a change... these are experiments... just guidance as we explore ways to improve the usefulness of the site."

In response to privacy concerns, the blog post also added that "if any editor would like to abstain from participating in this and other experiments in the future, they can select the 'Exclude me from feature experiments' option in their user preferences."

Further bug fixes highlighted

After numerous bugs were found in the wake of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.17 almost a month ago, developer Robert Lanphier chose to highlight some of the issues that had recently been resolved (Wikimedia Techblog).


When the category sorting changes come into effect, they should enable non-English wikis to have their categories sorted in a more logical order, rather than have letters with diacritics sorted after Z.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks. Users interested in the "tarball" release of MW1.17 should follow bug #26676.

  • Okawix, a new piece of software designed to allow users to read Wikipedia articles offline on their mobile devices, has entered its beta testing phase and would like to get more testers on board (Wikiwix blog).
  • Calls were put out for potential Google Summer of Code applicants to put their names forward. Students could work either on MediaWiki or Semantic MediaWiki; the programme, which runs from April to September, attracts funding of 5000 USD per student (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • The ability to export articles in an openZim format was integrated into the "Collection" extension (wikitech-l mailing list). The integration forms part of the Foundation's efforts to make Wikimedia wikis more available in offline formats.
  • After long discussion surrounding bug #24313, the preference for uniformly marking all one's edits as minor by default has been removed from the English Wikipedia. The removal was designed to discourage its use. As a result of bug #27403, however, users may temporarily find themselves "locked in" to their old preference even if it was set to true. A process of notification is underway.
  • Registration for the Berlin Hackathon is now open. The annual meetup will feature "more hacking and less talking" this year (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Blocking usernames including spaces should now work correctly (bug #28017).
  • Gerard Meijssen blogged about bug #19412, which refers to PHP's failure to interpret dates in languages other than English.

    Reader comments

2011-03-14

Report on Editcountitis. 27% of all edits have been done by just 4,000 editors

The 4,000 most active Wikipedians compared to the rest of the EN Wikipedia community as of March 2, 2011.

An update from the department of editcountitis.

In the last three years the number of edits needed to get onto List of 4,000 Wikipedians who have done the most edits rose 5,000 edits to 11,426, meaning a very small number of extremely active users continue to contribute large numbers of edits. Since the start of last year the number of editors breaking the 100,000 barrier has jumped by more than half, from 68 to 109, whilst the number of editors who have contributed over 200,000 edits has doubled from ten to twenty. This prompted a proposal to broaden the list from the 4,000 editors with the highest edit count to 5,000. So as of the 9th March 2011 all editors with 9,168 edits or more are on the latest list (though some have opted out of being named).

Across all Wikimedia projects the threshold is much higher on the list of the thousand Wikimedians with most edits everyone has over 55,000 edits. If it could combine edits by the same editor across multiple projects the minimum would doubtless be even higher.

Kevin Rutherford (user:Ktr101) has created these charts to compare the number of edits by the most "prolific" editors on the English language Wikipedia to the rest of the community:

I originally created the graphs after a few on and off ideas over the past few months of wondering how many edits the top four thousand of us hold. At first I thought that it would be a fairly small percentage, something like one out of every eight edits. After I compiled the edits, I was shocked to realize that the top 4,000 editors hold over one quarter of the edits on this site. Divided up amongst the top four thousand, each user on the list makes just over 30,275 edits. This might not seem to much at first, but to those of us who make manual edits, those are years of our lives that are being shown on that graph. I also created the edit distribution graph as a way to see what the last end of a distribution of Wikipedian edits would be and it was exactly as I thought it would be. As expected, it climbs steadily and then jumps up at the end, as our most active editors are counted in. If you think of the fact that there are around 14.1 million editors on the site, that chart is probably just a tiny percentage of the overall percent of Wikipedians who edit.

It is quite a fascinating idea to think that the bunch of us who also are in this group also come from a diverse background in our lives. The average Wikipedian is a male post-graduate student who edits in his spare time. The range of active community is quite unlimited in age but when you think about the fact that it is more likely that these average editors are also giving a lot of time to us while simultaneously earning a degree, it makes one step back and wonder what they can do to help the site some more.



N.B. Wikipedians who do not want to be on the list of most active editors can have themselves removed in one of two entirely painless ways: by fessing up to actually being a bot and applying for a bot flag at wp:bot requests, or more conventionally by adding themselves to the opt out list.

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