Research talk:Wikipedia article creation/Work log/Monday, December 23rd

Monday, December 23rd

Article page survival (enwiki). The monthly proportion of surviving articles is plotted for "article pages" by the namespace from which they originated and by the tenure of the editor at time of draft creation.

Well, that took longer than expected. The plot above has been updated with new data. It's cool to see the survival rate of ns=0 articles start to rise for "-day" newcomers at the introduction of AfC (ns=5). There's a surprising dip in survival for "week-month" newcomers around 2011. Note that this could be error due to a low number of observations. I didn't even plot a point if it didn't come with at least 25 observations.

In the meantime, I want to get a sense for where users are creating their articles. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

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I wanted to simplify things, so I generated stats based on the most recent full month in my dataset: October, 2013.

Articles published. The number of articles published on English Wikipedia in Oct. of 2013 is plotted by the tenure of the author and the original namespace of the page.

Unique authors. The number of unique article authors on English Wikipedia in Oct. of 2013 is plotted by the tenure of the author and the original namespace of the page.

Article survival. The survival proportion of articles published on English Wikipedia in Oct. of 2013 is plotted by the tenure of the author and the original namespace of the page.

Cool things that you can pick out from this:

1. There are about as many day-newbie article creators month-oldtimers article creators.
2. However, month-oldtimers create for more articles.
3. The proportion of articles started outside of main is vanishingly small for all editors.
4. The survival rate for newbies creating drafts is comparable to month-oldtimers who go straight to main.
5. User-space drafts (ns=2) created by oldtimers fair worse than direct to main articles. Could it be that oldtimers know when to pick their battles and will start more controversial articles in user-space?
6. Articles created through AfC have the highest survival rate for all types of newcomers.

That's all for today. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 23:21, 23 December 2013 (UTC)