Research:Editor model
The editor model is a suite of metrics used to understand the population of active editors of Wikimedia projects. It is an important standardized metric of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Overview
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Monthly active editors, defined as the number of registered users who made at least five edits in a calendar month, has long been used as a key barometer of the health of the Wikimedia community.
The editor model expands this single metric into a family of metrics that more fully describe who these active editors are and how they became active. The family shares several important parameters:
- Each metric is calculated using calendar months. It's also possible to use rolling 30-day periods, which avoids the problem of different-length months and allows the metrics to be calculated more than once a month. However, these benefits are fairly small (for example, calculating a rolling 30-day metric every day doesn't make it as responsive as a daily metric), and using calendar months makes it more efficient to calculate.
- 5 edits is threshold for being an active editor. This choice is relatively arbitrary, but has been used for a long time.
- All edits are counted, no matter what namespace or page they occurred in. Edits to deleted pages (that is, those in the archive table) are counted as well.
- Bot accounts (as identified via user group membership) are excluded.
Active editors
[edit]The core metric in the editor model is monthly active editors—the number of editors who made at least 5 edits in a calendar month.
Types of active editors
[edit]The editor model break active editors down into four subclasses.
| Active last month | Not active last month | |
|---|---|---|
| Registered this month | New editor | |
| Registered last month | Surviving new editor | Reactivated editor |
| Registered before last month | Recurring old editor |
New editors
[edit]A new active editors is a user who both registered and made 5 edits within the current month.
Surviving new editors
[edit]A surviving new active editor is a user who was a new active editor last month, and has continued to be an active editor this month.
Recurring old editors
[edit]A recurring old active editor is a user who registered more than two months ago, was active last month, and has continued to be active this month.
Reactivated editors
[edit]A reactivated editor is a user who was active this month, but was not active last month despite already being registered.
Conversion rates
[edit]New editor activation rate
[edit]The proportion of this month's newly registered users who became new active editors.
New active survival rate
[edit]The proportion of the previous month's new active editors who remained active this month (becoming surviving new active editors)
Old active survival rate
[edit]The proportion of the previous month's other active editors (that is, those who were not new active editors) who remained active this month (becoming recurring old active editors).