User:WereSpielChequers/editor decline after July 2015

In July 2015 Visual Editor became the default for new editors on the English language Wikipedia. These tables highlight the change to numbers of newly registered editors committing their tenth edit on Wikipedia, and all registered editors committing five or more edits in months  before and after that  change. Changes are measured against the same month the year before in order to compensate for seasonal change and differing length of months.

Figures after June 2015 are in Italics to denote the era when WP:Visual Editor was default for new registered accounts.


 * This table highlights the change to numbers of new editors committing their tenth edit on Wikipedia before and after July 2015.

auto confirmed (10th edit) before and after July 2015 (as per March 2016)

 * This table highlights the change to numbers of editors committing 5 or more edits per month on Wikipedia before and after July 2015.

auto confirmed (10th edit) before and after July 2015 (as per Feb 2016)

 * This table highlights the change to numbers of editors committing 5 or more edits per month on Wikipedia before and after July 2015.

Editors saving five or more edits per month before and after July 2015
Other hypothesised explanations for the slump are:
 * There could be a glitch in the figures. The January figures showed a change to December which had been affected by a glitch.
 * The general shift of internet users from desktop to mobile (editing on mobile is much less practical than on a PC, so the conversion rate from readers to editors is going to be less if they are on tablets and dramatically less if they are on smartphones). However this is a gradual process that had been going on for years and unlikely to cause such a swing from slow growth to sharp decline.
 * Firefox has changed their browser to offer a "reader friendly" view of Wikipedia - removing the editing features. One would expect this to have a negative impact on the recruitment of editors, but I'm not sure when the change took place. An analysis of newly autoconfirmed editors by browser and recent month would test that theory.

All stats sourced from stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm retrieved 26/2/2016