evidence for the proposed measure of community strength?

Active administrators are plummeting as reader and editor growth continues.

Is there any evidence that "positive growth in active contributors" is a better measure of community strength than the ratio of active admins to active contributors? If so, what is that evidence?

There are strong arguments to the contrary from induction. Admins already complain that they are overworked and stressed by frequent difficult content disputes and occasional personal threats. As the ratio of admins to contributors decreases, that workload and the stress associated with it is certain to increase.

The problems with conflict of interest editing described in this letter are very real. There is no evidence that merely trying to grow more contributors while active admin participation plummets is making that problem any better. Merely trying to grow contributors without attending to the relative number of active admins is likely contrary to the goal of community strength.

What's the definition of "active" for this graph?

"30 edits in the last 60 days"

Wow - that's a pretty strict definition of active... it's about 300% more strict than we're using anywhere else on this wiki (5 edits per month).

Do you believe the trend would be any different at a different activity threshold? If so, why?

I have no reason to believe or disbelieve that. I'm simply pointing out that the definition of terms is different. :)

I have to say, I've never been so keen on 5 edits per month being the definition of active. That's incredibly few edits. I know it's always really hard to draw lines and any number one comes up with is going to be arbitrary. But five edits is just a little over one a week. And, really, how much can be achieved making one edit a week? Five edits would barely constitute one sweep of a day's changes on a watchlist of a thousand articles.

Obviously ONE edit could be the drafting of an entire new article or an entire draft policy that becomes a tremendous boon to the project, but I suspect people that do that kind of thing are also people who make a large number of edits.

All that said, I don't propose we change it now!

There is some evidence that using the 5 edits per month will show less attrition, based on other attrition statistics.

I am not really interested in playing numbers games... what I *am* interested in is making sure that whatever numbers we use are real; using comparisons of different measures without consistently using the same comparison is questionable from a metrics point of view....

Incidentally, Erik Zachte added some history on the "active" stat on the active contributors page.