Things that extend a wiki career
Hi Diederik, I think a useful approach on this would be to analyse wiki breaks. It would be helpful to know of the people who have stopped editing for three months how many edit again after 1, 2, 3 or more months. Once we know that only y% of editors who have been inactive for 36 months are likely to return in a given month then we can be more robust about predicting how many future inactives will return. Of course the project is far too young to know how many will return after gaps of a decade or more. But I would anticipate that if we charted length of wikibreaks we would see a pattern and could start extrapolating and making predictions as to future returning Wikipedianss. At some point in the future we will probably get an idea of:
- How long a break needs to be before we can be 99% confident that the editor will not return.
- Whether editors of the "founder generation" (2001-2005) will have a different pattern here to later generations.
- Whether editors have a different reactivation pattern if they are active on other Wikimedia projects - currently we analyse each project quite separately.
- Whether the chance of someone returning is linked to their number of edits or usergroups
- How blocks, bans, exercising right to vanish or posting a retirement template alter your chance of returning.
Also I would dispute that we can never say an account is permanently closed. We know that some former editors are dead, we don't currently have an appropriate distinct flag for that though we probably need one (I would predict that by 2100 most of our current editors will be dead). We also know that some people have been caught abusing multiple accounts and even if they are unblocked usually all but one of those accounts will be permanently blocked.
Hi WereSpielChequers,
We do consider wiki breaks in the current Editor Trends Study when calculating the tenure of a Wikimedia editor but I think you raise some interesting additional questions. I think we should collect these additional questions (maybe on the page Editor_Trends_Study/Future_Research and see how we can answer these.
Best, Diederik