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Posted by: nobs

The Foundation list is in a tizzy. Internal statistics for the English Wikipedia have not been compiled since October 2006. Independent analysis shows the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis#New_articles.2C_new_users.2C_new_administrators. New users http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Wikipedia_New_Users.png

Posted by: blissyu2

It also seems that their rate of unproductive edits has climbed to over 20%:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis#Revert_rate

Posted by: nobs

60% of "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia_Revert_Distribution.png" are made by pimply faced Admins. Like that's news. We always knew you had to be a member of the club.

Posted by: Kato

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis#Revert_rate from the study is most interesting.

Posted by: Somey

That's a rather mean thing for Mr. Flight to say, isn't it? I mean, putting aside the plainly obvious fact that Wikipedia is now firmly into the maintenance phase, in which these sort of statistics are predictable and inevitable, there were other things that happened during that timeframe too - like the whole BADSITES brouhaha, Citizendium, and the totally unfair re-banning of User:Blissyu2, each of which probably caused at least 200,000 WP users to quit in disgust and revulsion. By comparison, the Essjay thing was really more of a blip...

Am I wrong?

Posted by: the fieryangel

hmm, I wonder what happened to ED's stats during the same period? What would it mean if those went up?

Anyway, what did they expect? You try to run the riffraff off and you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They could have had armies of academics working for them, but they ran them all off because of their horrible attitude towards editors. They ran the kids off (remember JzG telling a class of school children that they should find another place to host their page?) and they ran quite a few adults off too by either deleting their contributions, making them feel unwelcome and making everybody who didn't understand what a "diff", "NPOV", "COI" and "AGF" was feel like a complete idiot.

Now, they're upset because their stats are going down?

This is surprising?

...Hopefully, the sponsors will see the same stats and will start giving their money to other, more dynamic organisations, rather than this passé clique of basement dwellers....

Posted by: guy

How do you know what they look like?



And of course the banning of Poetlister and friends, who were making over 50% of the best edits.

Posted by: KamrynMatika

No, 60% of the edits that admins make are 'normal' edits. So 40% of their edits are reverts or have been reverted. Meaning that they edit far less than plain registered users, who have 82% of their edits as 'normal'. (i.e. not reverts or wasn't reverted).

And the graph for their 'decline' is hardly surprising as editing is dropping off around September/October. I think the decline is more likely to be the result of people going back to school/college than abusive admins.

I think the tendency here to focus on the bad side of Wikipedia makes us overestimate the impact that a few abusive admins have. They don't have enough influence to cause the rate of edits per day to drop by around 25,000.

Pay attention to the fact that deletions have gone down vastly in the last month - as admins are mostly college students, this is hardly surprising.

Posted by: JohnA

If you look carefully, the decline began in late February/early March. Perhaps Wikipedia has peaked.

Posted by: jorge

http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html

Posted by: guy

No, not a pimple in sight, not even on Jimbo himself.

Oh nearly missed it - my 2,000th post.

Posted by: jorge

The photos are not really detailed enough for pimple analysis.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

No, but they show an impressive array of bad haircuts.

Posted by: nobs

From memory, of 1300 Admins, 600 are under 18 (one of which was the surrogate who extended my block). According to Newsmax, a RS, WP:V source,

I'm not even gonna try to guide where the discussion goes from here....

Posted by: thekohser

Well, I'd like to say that shortly after the Essjay scandal cracked, I noted a perceptible decline in financial contributions to the Foundation. I http://centiare.com/Wikipedia_scandals. Later, I discovered that one huge single-bunch donation (WP:SBD) kind of threw off my numbers. Various Wikipediots were laughing at my entire premise.

"Essjay is just a tiny blip on the radar that will be forgotten in a matter of weeks, if not days," they said. (I paraphrase.)

Oh, how the worm turns now, eh? More data with February 2007 marking a high-water point.

I rest.

Greg

Posted by: nobs

Excellent graph. Can I use it for our WP entry at Conservapedia? I'll give you credit with a link. Who should be creditted?

Posted by: Firsfron of Ronchester

Can you update the graph, Greg? It's hard to tell, but it looks like daily donations are back up to over $2,000 a day, with last month being one of the biggest donation periods since Wikipedia started keeping these records. http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/en/fundcore/browse

Posted by: Somey

Looks like they got http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/en/fundcore/list?edit%5Bstart%5D%5Byear%5D=2007&edit%5Bstart%5D%5Bmonth%5D=9&edit%5Bstart%5D%5Bday%5D=1&edit%5Bend%5D%5Byear%5D=2007&edit%5Bend%5D%5Bmonth%5D=10&edit%5Bend%5D%5Bday%5D=1&edit%5Bcurrency%5D=&edit%5Bminimum%5D=9999&op=View+results&edit%5Bform_id%5D=fundcore_filter last month, one of which was from "Anonymous." The other two look like they might be bequests...? Anyway, that tends to throw off the curve.

I sometimes wonder if some of the more dedicated Wikipedians actually lobby their own rich parents/grandparents (assuming they have any) to give or leave money to the WMF... Things like that do happen, though of course it's normally for much more worthy causes like medical research, local orphanages, animal rescue operations, things of that nature.

Posted by: thekohser

No, I won't update the graph. Reason: the Foundation apparently makes it a habit to "log" large donations whenever the heck they happen to get around to it, even if it means "back-dating" a donation a considerable number of days or even weeks. Being that they don't make their public donation data accurate, I'll make no further attempts to render correct representations of it.

By the way, the reason donations have picked up recently is that they switched on the "Please give us your money" headers when people sign in -- similar to what they did in December 2006-January 2007. So, if you want to make comparisons (with the "is it real, or is it Jimborex?" data), you should be comparing today's donation levels with those we saw, say, in the first few weeks of this year. I believe you'll see that current levels trail the most recent "fund-drive" period.

Greg

Posted by: Castle Rock

Well their Alexa rank has climbed a lot over the past couple of months. I don't think they cater to the same crowd though.