User:Rhododendrites/refdesk stats

What this is
There's a thread at WT:RD about a possible "drop off" in questions being asked. After pointed to the Wikipedia Page History Statistics tool, I was curious. Below is a table of edits made to the different reference desks broken down by month, along with monthly averages and top contributors. Where a figure can be directly compared by year, the 2013 and 2014 numbers are highlighted.

Only 2013 and 2014 are included because the tool only includes the last 50k edits, which does not span backwards in time equally but covers 2013 and 2014 on all desks.

These tables are current as of 2014.04.16. They will almost certainly never be updated.

Edits by month/year
*The first number for 04/2014 is the edit count so far. In order to calculate/compare, an estimate for the month was used, based on the first 16 days. The estimate is given in parentheses.

Interpretation
It does appear that there has been a drop in edits generally. Comparing January-April 2013 to January-April 2014, edits fell on all desks but Language, which saw a small increase. The Science and Humanities desks saw the biggest drops, at -39% and -34%, respectively, when comparing the first four months of 2014 and 2013. When comparing the average number of edits per month in 2014 (January-April) to the average number of edits per month in 2013 (January-December), the numbers are less dramatic but still noticeably less.

User contributions
Below is a list of user contributions to the reference desk, first by desk and then overall. Bots are grayed.

Users with 2000+ contributions
19 users have a total of more than 2000 edits across refdesks.

What now
Regardless of whether or not people are posting more or less to the reference desk(s) it seems awfully difficult to use this data to make any kind of causal argument. I compiled it just out of curiosity and don't think anyone should be using it for anything other than getting a better sense of the refdesk ecosystem. If anyone is interested to maintain this table, you're welcome to do so here or to copy it to your own userpage. --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk  |  21:28, 17 April 2014 (UTC)