On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 10:47 PM, Erik Zachte wrote:

I just realize that the YoY +2%, which LIMN shows and which I reported earlier, will probably be around 0% on next report. As always the latest active editor counts shrinks 1% – 2% in subsequent month as more quick deletions of Jan 2012 content will still happen.

ErikM March 13, 2013:

I’d like to get this “deletion drift” issue on the mid-term agenda for the analytics team. While I understand why you chose this approach with WikiStats, I think the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Having comparative data from month to month continually shift does materially impact our ability to plan and to understand trends in the data. Freezing the data at month-end and only making corrections in cases of genuine errors in measurement seems much preferable to me.

I think with such an approach, we can simply take as a given that some % of TAE are not making constructive contributions. That is a given anyway as we can’t account for quality of edits.

I realize this is very non-trivial given the way the data pipeline currently works, but I at least want to be on record that we should aim for numbers being frozen at measurement point and only corrected in case of measurement errors, as a design characteristic. That applies to article counts and other such measures as well—if we measured 3M articles in January 2012, and 2.5M in February 2012 because 500K articles were deleted (absurd example), that does not negate our 3M article measurement from January.

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