User:WereSpielChequers/100+ editors

These tables are for monitoring the apparent turnaround in the total of Wikipedians saving over 100 edits a month on the English Wikipedia. After several years of this metric declining it appears to have turned round in January 2015 - just after the HHVM speedup.

The stats are complex, because only live edits by human as opposed to computerised/AI editors to mainspace articles count, so there is a natural tendency for figures to drop over time as articles are deleted. As bots are excluded there will also be anomalies when bots are deflagged or deflagged bots are added to the list of former bots.

as per October stats
October 2015 was the highest October figure since October 2010.

as per November stats
As with October, November 2015 was the highest November figure since November 2010.

as per December stats
Unlike October and November 2015, December 2015 was only the highest December figure since 2011 rather than 2010.

as per Jan 16 stats
Unlike October and November 2015, December 2015 was only the highest December figure since 2011 rather than 2010.

as per Feb 16 stats
Unlike October and November 2015, December 2015 and January & February 2016 were only the highest figures since the same month in 2011 rather than 2010.

as per March 16 stats
Unlike October and November 2015, December 2015 and January & February 2016 were only the highest figures since the same month in 2011 rather than 2010.

Theories
Possible causes of changes to stats of the same month over time include:


 * Deletion. When an article is deleted all of the edits to that article cease to be "live" and will not be included in the next stats run. Most deletions occur on very new articles, so the most typical effect will be a drop on the one month old figures. But sometimes articles get deleted after many years.
 * Restoration. Rather less common than deletion, but there are processes to review deletion decisions and reverse them. When an article is restored there can be multiple edits that become live again and they can be from any time in the last decade or more.
 * Redirecting. When an article is blanked and redirected to another article or a section in an article then all the edits to that page disappear.
 * Turning a redirect into an article. Sometimes editors will disagree with a redirect and convert it back into an article. This might be because the fictional character concerned has now been the lead character in a successful spinoff series, making her sufficiently notable to merit an article on her rather than simply redirecting her name to the article on the show. But it might also be because there is a notable Professor of the same name as the fictional character, and while the fictional character was deemed unnotable and the article on her redirected to the article on the relevant show, when someone converts the redirect into an article all the previous edits are then considered live again.
 * History merges/splits. Admins have the ability to delete and restore edits and articles. Taking the previous example, if an admin tidied up by deleting the article, restoring the edits about the fictional character, moving them to a redirect in the format name (TV show) then restoring the article on the academic; The edits on the Academic would count as live, but the edits on the fictional character would not as they were the history of a deleted page.
 * Userfication. Sometimes people will request that a deleted article be restored and moved to their userspace for them to work on it.
 * Cross wiki importing. Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 languages, and while many editors prefer to write articles from scratch rather than translate, others will translate between two languages they know (or between the language they know and the one they are learning). Attribution for the source material can be done via a link, or by importing a copy of the edit history from the source wiki. Imported edits, which may be from over a decade ago and by an editor who has never edited in that language, are live and will be included in subsequent stats. Nowadays importing the edit history is a deprecated practice, but considered by some to be the best way to comply with licensing.
 * Sandboxing. Many editors write new articles in sandboxes in their userspace or off wiki in a wordprocessor before moving them to mainspace. If they "move" such articles from sandboxes to mainspace then all the edits, sometimes hundreds over several months, will become live edits in mainspace. If they simply copy from their sandbox or wordprocessor then those edits don't reach mainspace. Wikipedia regards all three methods of article writing to be equally valid, along with others such as starting articles in mainspace, but they result in very different edit counts.
 * Bots. Some accounts are used to run automated editing such as removing a deprecated template or adding a date stamp whenever someone puts into an article. Where practical Bot edits are excluded from these counts, however there are anomalies in this. Most but not all bots contain the word bot in their name; and are flagged as bots whilst they are actively editing. However there are some accounts that contain the word bot including several active ones that declined to be renamed when the bot convention was introduced. The Bot flag is removed when a bot account retires, and though these stats use a list of former bots, as well as a list of accounts that contain the word bot but aren't bots, neither is either complete or instantaneously updated.

This table started for this signpost article.

Data from stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm