Research talk:Refining the definition of monthly active editors

2012 correction

Is this correct? [1] I think that change was about the implementation of the counting, which didn't respect the definition that well, rather than a change in the definition. --Nemo 13:57, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand this concern. As explained in the linked blog post [2], the 2012 change did actually affect the TAE numbers, which would have hardly been possible if the definition of the metric had remained the same ;) Perhaps this is about semantics - I would understand deciding about "counting" to define a set and then take the cardinality of that set. If one prefers to look at it on an individual level: If you had 100 uploads to Commons and no edits elsewhere in a given month, you were not considered an active editor before the 2012 change, but after that you were.

But I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "the implementation of the counting, which didn't respect the definition that well", perhaps you can rephrase it in a more precise way?

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

The definition is currently «An 'active editor' is a registered (and signed in) person (not known as a bot) who makes 5 or more edits in any month [...]». Identifying who's a person is not trivial: that blog post is not really about a change in the definition itself, from what I can see, but rather in its implementation: the deduplication used to just be "let's not count Commons" and is now "let's just assume that one username is at most one person". But yes, it's just nitpicking. --Nemo 17:58, 21 November 2013 (UTC)