User:Chieftain Alex/wiki data

July 2022 - Users in 2022

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Repeated the 2019 exercise with the 2022 data. (click here to view full size and zoom in).

Logarithmic axes have been used. On the left is the total edit count divided by the age of the account. On the bottom is the age in months. Finally the size of the bubble is each user's total edit count. Color shows user groups (gray = bot, yellow = admin team, green = extended, blue = default)

November 2020 - Users in 2020

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Repeated the 2019 exercise with the 2020 data. (click here to view full size and zoom in).

Logarithmic axes have been used. On the left is the total edit count divided by the age of the account. On the bottom is the age in months. Finally the size of the bubble is each user's total edit count. As a finishing touch I've added the release dates for major content.

November 2019 - Users in 2019

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Every so often, as shown below, I like to take a look at which new users we've picked up since the year before.

This dataset is a bit cranky to generate. First you start with the Users who made an edit. (48k of the 222k users registered have made an edit, either here or on the GW1 wiki). Then you filter for Autoconfirmed editors (12k editors). Then I've taken a further cut of those, taking into consideration editcount vs account age. This results in about 1200 users.

Not all of those 1200 users will make mainspace edits, and some won't have done so in the last couple of months. I'd have liked to have used Special:ActiveUsers, but it is bugged and misses some accounts you'd expect to see (e.g. Tyndel has made an edit in the last week, but is missing from the automated list that is supposed to show any editor in the last 30 days). Because of that bug I've retrieved all the edits for the 1200 users since 1st September 2019. This yields about 146 users.

Finally with a bit of manual tweaking we can eliminate a few more users who maybe turned up for September but haven't really contributed a lot since January. This results in 84 users, which I've plotted on the graph below (click here to view full size and zoom in).

Logarithmic axes have been used. On the left is the total edit count (yes this includes GW1W before the database split) divided by the age of the account. On the bottom is the age in months. Finally the size of the bubble is each user's total edit count. As a finishing touch I've added the release dates for major content.

December 2018 - sending thanks to each other

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So it's that festive time of year where traditionally people send warm wishes to other people. Its the same on the wiki, except people help each other out all year round. Sometimes we even say thanks to each other.

"Thank" is a button that appears in page history or on old revisions. It sends a tiny notification message directly to the editor responsible for that revision that appears in the top right of a logged in user's screen.

Although other editors cannot see what that user was thanked for, they can see which user thanked another user and when. I thought it'd be fun to plot this on three graphs:

Thanks by date

• This is really promising - evidently December only has partial data so far, but we might hit 100 thanks this month.

Who sent thanks

• No prizes for guessing, its for good reasons that Greener is the most well liked guy on the wiki.

Who got thanked

• Frequent editors get thanked a bunch.

Happy Christmas.

November 2018 - Post-patch editing

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It's only been 24 hours, but already the wiki has caught up with the majority of the changes brought about by Game updates/2018-11-13.

I thought I'd take a look at who pushed the most edits in the 24 hour period, excluding bots:

In text form:

1. User:Life Infusion: 107 edits
2. User:Chieftain Alex: 104 edits
3. User:Almdudler: 74 edits
4. User:Doodleplex: 53 edits
5. User:Sk8er Of Bodom: 51 edits
6. User:Tolkyria: 44 edits
7. User:Ventriloquist: 41 edits
8. User:Sime: 38 edits
9. User:Spentx: 36 edits
10. User:J.P.: 24 edits
11. User:FanklingAfreet: 17 edits
12. User:Diazul: 15 edits
13. User:Thalegend: 14 edits
14. User:Intricity: 11 edits
15. User:Deathmortus: 11 edits
16. User:Jebro: 10 edits

I admit I've been fairly lazy with filtering the data, I just looked at any edit from a logged in user (sorry IP's!), from when the patch hit to 21:30 14/11/2018, for Main namespace edits only. If any of those editors see this, then thanks for your tireless contributions to make the wiki up to date as quickly as possible.

October 2018 - On Wiki of Gold

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User:Dashface asked for some statistics for the On Wiki of Gold project. This project has been going on for just over 2 years now, since the beginning of September 2016. 186 unique users have contributed to the project. On average, their account creation age is roughly Q3 2016. (i.e. roughly half of the contributors to the project created their accounts sometime during the project). The graph of their account creation ages is quite similar to the graph below for all active wiki users.

Dashface asked "if there's an easy way to draw it out of the data, I'd be interested to see how many accounts had an edit to the On Wiki of Gold project page (or its old home in the user space) as one or more of its first ten edits. And then maybe filtered for users who went on to make a significant number of edits. (100+ or something)"

Sounds simple? Actually without downloading every contribution of a given user, you can't guarantee that you know which was their first edit. Edit count in Special:Contributions doesn't always line up with Special:Preferences either (primarily due to deletions + move logs etc). We can guess what a user's edit count was at a given date though. In this instance I've set my script to crawl through all contributions since 01/09/2016.

Using this information, we can figure out who had made comparatively little edits at the time of their first edit to the OWOG project page. I've filtered out any user whose first edit to the OWOG page was > their 25th edit.

On the X-axis is the number of OWOG project page edits, used here as a metric for involvement with the project. On the Y-axis I've then plotted the number of contributions since their first edit to the OWOG project.

I'd expect the more motivated users to be towards the top-left corner.

October 2018 - Active users

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I thought I'd explore the detail behind the magic word {{NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS}}. As of the time I'm writing this, its 373. That is to say, 373 editors made an edit in the last 30 days.

Comments on the data

I've downloaded the metadata summary for all the active user's edits back to the start of 2012 for the article namespace. I picked 2012 since its the year Guild Wars 2 was released.

These 373 editors have made a whopping 373,050 edits in total, i.e. an average of 1,000 edits each. No, that's not just me, honest.

In reality most of the editing is done by a smaller number of users, and 75 editors didn't make any edits to pages in the article namespace. 80% of the 373050 edits were performed by 17 particularly active users, for an average of 17,500 edits each.

Graphing the data

I've tried to express this on the following graph:

On the X-axis I've plotted the account creation date (the date when you registered your wiki account).

To calculate the Y-axis value, I've taken the date of each editor's edit, and subtracted the account creation date - this forms a wedge with old users on the left and new users on the right.

I've then ranked users by the number of edits per day, i.e. total edits divided by account age. I've then picked out the top 20 most active editors by edits per day.

I chose to filter out users without 500 edits since if you created your account yesterday and made three edits you'd likely end up as a top editor...

The highlighted names feel about right since I recognise most of them from Special:RecentChanges.

Influence of release dates

I've then taken the year and quarter that each of the active editors created their wiki account and plotted it as follows:

For reference, the user database was originally merged with the Guild Wars 1 Wiki, and that site started in 2007. After the release of the Eye of the North expansion, ArenaNet announced Guild Wars 2 in late 2007 with this wiki being set up just before Q1 2008.

It seems that we've still got a sizeable number of active editors from the original wiki - i.e. the gray sections.

It's not quite what I thought the graph might look like - active users seem to be fairly evenly distributed over the last 5 years.

I find it interesting that we've got as many active editors who registered at the release of Heart of Thorns as at Path of Fire release 2 years later.

May 2017 - Admins

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Old data by now but still kinda interesting...

Image 1

The first table shows whether admins had one or more edits during a given month.

The second table shows whether admins had 30 or more edits during a given month.

I've deliberately hidden the complete edit count from the results.

Image 2 - All namespace edits by admin

• Admin edits are less diverse than they used to be.
• Doodle may be the reincarnation of shard lime.

Image 3 - Talk page edits by admin

• We don't talk as much as we used to.

Image 4 - Total edits by all admins

• Rather surprising, the total number of edits by our admin team has stayed broadly similar over the past six years.

Image 5 - Total edits by all admins stacked