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Research:WMF Strategy document: Research about contributors/What we have

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High-level stats

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Year Page Description
Ongoing Active editors dashboard WMF analytics dashboard allows us to see rolling active editors for prior month of any project
Ongoing Edit history charts for top 50 Wikipedias
Ongoing? List of Wikipedias Note the Depth metric: "The "Depth" column (Edits/Articles × Non-Articles/Articles × [1−Stub-ratio]) is a rough indicator of a Wikipedia’s quality, showing how frequently its articles are updated."
Ongoing List of Wikimedia projects by size
Ongoing High-level Wikimedia stats portal
Ongoing Wikimedia project summaries See a verbose chart with similar data on articles, number of active editors, etc
Ongoing New Wikipedians
2002-2012/13 Wikimedia project growth
Ongoing Site performance dashboards for editors For example, see Visual Editor latency
2009-2014 Squid reports of edits by country
? What skins do our users use?
? Bot activity chart
Ongoing Activity by mailing list
2002-2014 New admins on ENWP by month
Ongoing? Users/admins compared to other wikis
Unknown? Edits from Mobile?
2007-2014 Education dashboard

Survey resources

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Year Survey Description
2015 WMSV infographic on contributors Based on this research.
2012 - 2015 Fundraising focus groups Available with Megan
2014 Global South Survey Available with Haitham
2012 Editor survey (questions) Tilman not yet releasing data, concerned about how it will be used due to incomparable collection methodologies
Dec 2011 Editor survey
Apr 2011 Editor survey
2008 Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT (with WMF) Blog posts & lots of backstory on Meta.
2009 Multimedia study
? Wikipedia Library user survey Survey of active content contributors using The Wikipedia Library (spoiler alert: they want more free resources)
? Ongoing usability surveys Check w/ Abby?
2013 WMNL survey
2014 Survey from Wiki Ed Foundation

Key finding about surveys: Collection methodology differed from each survey, and much of the methodology was flawed so unlikely to be repeated in future. Thus, can't help us benchmark for year over year changes. Much of the data in these surveys is old enough that it may be better to start over, and think about a cleaner year-to-year collection setup.

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File:PlotEditsZZ-jan.png
Year Study Descriptions
Ongoing Activity chart from the top 50 Wikipedias
2010 2010 strategy editor trends study
2012 Editor Milestones
2012 Portuguese Wikipedia trends and behavior
2014 The sudden decline of Italian Wikipedia
2014 Grantmaking's analysis of Global South contributor trends + gender diversity summary see slides 4-6
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There are a few trends that I have heard discussed around WMF and the Wikimedia community, and I am curious if there is a canonical reference point for these:

Deletionism
Deletionism is an age-old debate from within the community. Does it matter for our high-level discussion of content contributors? Stephen (talk) 20:14, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
Rule bloat
ENWP has a ton of policies. A bunch of people have discussed this as a problem. Stephen (talk) 20:14, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
Editor lifecycle
Around 2010-11, I know the WMF developed a model "lifecycle" for contributors (based on research) that influenced the Growth Team's work. Was this formalized and preserved anywhere? Is it still up-to-date? Stephen (talk) 20:14, 15 January 2015 (UTC)
Participation metric
Why do we use "edit count" as a metric for participation? Stephen (talk) 07:51, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Structure and organization of content contributors

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Date Source Notes
Ongoing Wikimonicon (Who are the community? and The community's work) An intro to the community, for WMF staff
July 2012 Wikimania presentation on editor motivations
2012 Philippe's talk on how not to structure a community We should get this from Philippe
2013 Wikimedia movement mindmap Note where content projects fit into the
2014 Organizational hierarchy of content contributors See these pages for some context and Wikipedia sociology

Programs that (might) impact contributors

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Project Program Who initiated? Notes
RUWP Инкубатор (new editor assistance) Community
ENWP Teahouse WMF New editors who visit the Teahouse contribute 2-3x more than the control group w/ similar early editing patterns (measured in # of edits, # of articles, # of talk page discussions, and # of weeks they return to Wikipedia. [1]
FRWP Forum des nouveaux Community
global On-wiki writing contests Community / Grantees (?) let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
global WLM Grantees let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
global Wikipedia Education Program WMF (?) let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
global Edit-a-thons Community / grantees(?) let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
global Editing workshops Community(?) let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
global Other photo initiatives Community(?) let's pull out any key contributor findings from this report
  • See Warncke-Wang, M., Ayukaev, V. R., Hecht, B., & Terveen, L. The Success and Failure of Quality Improvement Projects in Peer Production Communities. pdf -- Reviews the effect of a bunch of Wiki initiatives to increase editing.

Research repositories

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Repository Notes
[Wikimedia Research Projects] WMF's research on various topics
WikiLit A literature review of Wikipedia
WikiPapers Bibliography and other details of scholarly research of wikis
"wikipedia" tag on CiteULike Some citations?
usability:Category:Multimedia usability - Research and Multimedia Usability Project report (2009-2010)

General

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Resources

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Other communities

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Random facts

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Question Notes
When do people usually edit? 20:00-21:00 UTC for registered users, 0:00-1:00 UTC for unregstered
How many edits come from AWB? 3% of all Wikipedia {{citation needed}}
What Wikipedia gets the most unregistered activity? ?

References

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