Research:Active editor

An active editor is a permanent non-bot user who makes at least 5 edits to content namespaces during a given month.

Implementation details

• Count edits even when they are made to pages that are later deleted (or when the revision is suppressed). When using a database replica, this means that edits from both the revision and archive tables should be counted.
• Content namespaces are the following:
  • The main namespace (namespace 0)
  • Extra namespaces explicitly marked as content in the site configuration
  • Any other namespaces that contain user-facing content and whose absence would seriously impact the quality of the metric. Currently, the only namespace among WMF projects generally considered meeting this definition is the File namespace (6) on Commons.
• Include all pages in content namespaces (including redirects), without filtering to countable pages only.
• If feasible, an edit's namespace should be the one that the page was in when the edit was made, whether or not the page was later moved to another namespace.
• If feasible, when a namespace is designated to be content, apply that designation to all history.
• Identify and exclude bot users using the following strategies, described in more detail on the bot users page:
  • Any user who has or in the past had the bot user right on any wiki (or globally) is considered a bot globally.
  • Any user whose name matches the standard "bot" regex is considered a bot. The known false positives (human users whose names match the regex) should be considered human.
• When calculating a global value, include all the content projects plus Meta, the Foundation wiki, the Incubator, and mediawiki.org.
  • In database terms, this is all wikis which have one of the following site_group values: ('commons', 'foundation', 'incubator', 'mediawiki', 'meta', 'sources', 'species', 'wikibooks', 'wikidata', 'wikifunctions', 'wikinews', 'wikipedia', 'wikiquote', 'wikisource', 'wikiversity', 'wikivoyage', 'wiktionary').
• When calculating a value across multiple wikis, total users' edits across all those wikis before filtering on the number of edits.

Notes

This differs from the definition of active users used by Special:Statistics (which counts any account with an action recorded in the Recent Changes table during the last 30 days - see the source code of SpecialActiveusers.php for more details).

History

• Active editor - A definition used by wikistats and in WMF grant reporting, based on analysis of MediaWiki database dumps.

See also

• Research:Refining the definition of monthly active editors, 2013
• Research:Defining monthly active editors, 2016
• mw:Contributors/Metrics (2015/16)