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cosmiclattes

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Some of the preliminary findings:

The monthly decline in active editors in the english wikipedia may be attributed to the old timers becoming less active. We see this across other languages too.

Only the articles in the (beginning - 2007) cohorts continue to see active edit activity.

Editor retention rates are much higher in languages like de(german), zh(chinese), ru(russian) etc.

zh(Chinese) shows an uptrend on many fronts. Active Editors, retention etc).

I've been working on visualizing editor behaviour on wikipedia for the past few months. The presentation below is a sneak peak on some of the graphs alongwith the explanation on reading them. They have some interesting findings.

The presentation - http://slides.com/cosmiclattes/edit-activity-graphs-analysis... The project page - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor_Behaviour_An... The Source Code - https://github.com/cosmiclattes/wikigraphs

Yes, the timelines are a bit confusing, the one on top is a zoomed in version of the one below. The one on top also shows also shows the time between the edits.

To show the change happening the tool fetches the html of every edit. So for a long article with a lot of edits it takes time to load the edits & to start the playback. There is a small slider that lets you control the speed of the playback.