Submissions/Staying or Going

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2015.

Submission no.: 2117

Title of the submission: Are you staying or are you going?

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): Presentation

Author of the submission: henna

E-mail address: hennargmail.com

Username: henna

Country of origin: Belgium

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): nl.wikipedia.org

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

On some Wikimedia projects, the number of active editors is now in decline. There has been qualitative research in this area and coordinated efforts at combating the issue. So far, most of this has focussed on large projects.

In this presentation, I will talk about how I used data analysis techniques and freely available edit data to identify differences between editors who stay and editors who leave. The differences are illustrated using data from the Dutch-language Wikipedia but the scripts behind it can be easily adapted for any language and project with more then a handfull editors.

Using the edit data, we can identify statistically significant differences between editors who stay and editors who leave. For instance, in what namespaces are edits made by those who stay active, and can we detect changes in behavior prior to an editor leaving? Can we identify editors who will not come back next month? Are there options for altering this prediction?

While some results where obvious—editors who stay have more edits in the user namespace, for instance—others were surprising, such as that no single change could be identified for a two-month period which would indicate that an editor would leave.

This talk is meant for a general audiance and does not require advanced knowledge of statistics or programming.

Track: WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: undecided

Slides or further information (optional): There's a research paper on this if anybody's interested

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Risker (talk) 02:21, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Ziko (talk) 13:49, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]