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"Contributors this month" statistic should be defined with NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS magic word
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Description

The new signup page uses a benefits column with little stats. One of them is "contributors this month". However, this is implemented with {{NUMBEROFUSERS}}, which is just the "Number of registered users".

We should either change this to use {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} ("Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days", or change the text.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47753

Details

Reference
bz47693

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 1:40 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz47693.

Thehelpfulonewiki wrote:

Yes that doesn't work, especially for enwiki.

I would say that this little problem is a blocker for any serious deployment.

According to http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page&type=signup&useNew=1 mediawiki.org had 889,737 contributors this month.

Such claim done by an official page under an official domain is something we don't want to see quoted accidentally or not elsewhere out of a testing context.

(In reply to comment #2)

Such claim done by an official page under an official domain is something we
don't want to see quoted accidentally or not elsewhere out of a testing
context.

Apparently this got announced on the Wikimedia blog with a link to the English Wikipedia. The current page reads "18,867,856 contributors this month" (the number of active users is 131,184). Swear to God. We're fixing it.

Though it occurs to me that the updated version still might read as though the stats are per month, when the edits stat is lifetime and the pages stat is lifetime. That is, you could read down the column as "X, Y, and Z this month", when really it's only Z that's per month. X and Y are over the lifetime of the project. This issue should also be investigated.

swalling wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)

The new signup page uses a benefits column with little stats. One of them is
"contributors this month". However, this is implemented with
{{NUMBEROFUSERS}}, which is just the "Number of registered users".

We should either change this to use {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}} ("Users who have
performed an action in the last 30 days", or change the text.

This was specified to be NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS in the documentation on MediaWiki.org, not NUMBEROFUSERS, so it's just wrong. Agreed that number of users is pretty meaningless. Anyway, easy enough to fix.

Related URL: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/60964 (Gerrit Change Icbbdf90830dd74bdf0d53a1bf07c3c9cddaa50e4)

gerrit 60964 was merged, but the corrosponding text "contributors this month" should also be updated, because 'this month' is depending on config, maybe change it to "contributors within last $1 day/days"

swalling wrote:

(In reply to comment #6)

Gerrit change #60964 was merged, but the corrosponding text "contributors
this month"
should also be updated, because 'this month' is depending on config, maybe
change it to "contributors within last $1 day/days"

Is the configuration actually different per Wikimedia project, or is it the same across the cluster?

Related URL: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/61068 (Gerrit Change I1166ed0f88782d7f96800d8b421534ef65427880)

It's the same across the cluster, and it falls back to the MW default. I made a note at the doc page (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgActiveUserDays) that the message may need customizing if it changes. It was already recommended not to change this on both the doc page and DefaultSettings.php

I also submitted https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/61068 to note this in the DefaultSettings doc. That should be good enough for now, but you can submit a bug to make the message smarter.

If the message is made smarter, I think it should still say "month" if it is at the recommended value of 30 days. It could say day/days otherwise (with PLURAL support).

swalling wrote:

(In reply to comment #10)

If the message is made smarter, I think it should still say "month" if it is
at
the recommended value of 30 days. It could say day/days otherwise (with
PLURAL
support).

Let's file the "make the message description smarter" as a separate bug to deal with.

By the way, "this month" refer to the current month or to the last 30/31 days? For me, it means from the first of the current month until now, so that is already misleading/unclear. Having the days there makes things clearer.

But that can be discussed in bug 47753