User talk:Harvestman/WP million survey

WP million survey
Click on the "+" tab over there, answer those six questions and please sign your answers. Thank you.

This survey is conducted amongst Wpians. One million people in the world did contribute to one million articles in the English WP. I should like to collect more precise facts about that event that took place around Feb. 2006.

The survey is launched simultaneously in Reference Desk/Misc and Village Pump/Misc.Please only give an answer here ; results, if of any help, can become a [ [Wikipedia:million survey] ] entry.

Reference deskers should only be allowed to guess and Village pumpers should try to give accurate numbers. Then we’ll mix results.

1) How many words did each user write in WP (main) ?

2) How many are left by user after refactoring, &c. ?

3) In which countries are located those users ?

4) What kind of curve depicts the distribution of contributions per user ?

5) How many hits reach the most accessed pages in WP (our statistics are as old as 2004) ?

6) What are the fact numbers and comparisons that could be exploited in paper, broadcast or web media to promote WP (like "The population of Fiji, or Estonia, or one quarter of Toronto ... contributed ..." or "This project compares only to the Pyramids for the number of people involved.")

Thank you for your answers. --DLL 20:14, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Really few answers ... those are from WP:RD/M

 * "One million people in the world did contribute to one million articles in the English WP." How do you figure?  Some people may have written multiple articles, some people who have WP logins may have written none. --LarryMac 21:01, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Why am I only allowed to guess just because I'm at the Reference Desk? Why do those Village Pumpers get to make accurate estimates? -KWH 22:31, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

One million people is simply not correct. A large number of contributions are done by anonymous users - some of these were unique numbers but many others were IP numbers which have been used by multiple users. A fairly large number of the "one million registered users" have no edits because they were either never used, registered to prevent fradulent use of names similar to established users or known trolls, or only used by vandals whose every edit has been deleted. How would we count users whose every edit was reverted but not deleted? - they haven't actually contributed to the encyclopedia. We really have no way of knowing how many people have edited Wikipedia. Rmhermen 04:55, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * You may want to read Avoid self-references before deciding to write an article about any results your survey may generate. &mdash; QuantumEleven | (talk) 16:04, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

To Quantum - an article which name begins like "Wikipedia: " does not belong to the main namespace. It is for further discussion about promotion based upon remarkable facts.

To Rmhermen & Larry - simplification is not my goal. A panel of article histories may be analysed and help better understanding of the true making of WP.

To Kwh : cry, but try to participate. Thanks to all. --DLL 20:46, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't know what your response means, and I still don't know how you can make the statement "One million people in the world did contribute to one million articles in the English WP." What is the basis for that statement? --LarryMac 21:39, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree. It's flagrantly wrong. Superm401 - Talk 21:54, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I understand that real users who did make contributions and still contribute do not want to be mixed up with unproductive users or trolleys. It was just a conjunction of numbers that does not mean so much. Forget the million users and begin answering.
 * I would expect statistics to help giving clear figures : from a panel (e.g. 100 random users contributed to 500, 1,000 or 10,000 articles) you have an extrapolation. --DLL 18:56, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

... As for WP:VP/Mxers :

 * It's an utterly meaningless survey, since we don't have anything close to a million people contributing (just a million accounts, and I would guess that 80% are blocked sockpuppets of one vandal or another). Kirill Lok s h in 20:26, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Simplification is not my goal. A panel of article histories may be analysed and help better understanding of the true making of WP. See also WP:RD/M. --DLL 20:49, 30 March 2006 (UTC)