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User:Rhododendrites/refdesk stats

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What this is

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There's a thread at WT:RD about a possible "drop off" in questions being asked. After APL 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

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↓ date / desk → Computing Entertainment Humanities Language Mathematics Miscellaneous Science
04/2014* 651 (1220) 373 (699) 1036 (1943) 545 (1022) 334 (626) 547 (1026) 1243 (2331)
03/2014 860 811 2016 1618 412 1054 2111
02/2014 665 582 1725 1550 333 947 1645
01/2014 691 483 1403 1320 375 1149 1603
12/2013 920 612 1527 1155 386 928 1765
11/2013 929 720 1892 1325 432 1130 2218
10/2013 773 775 2034 1554 575 1357 2257
09/2013 927 566 1722 1527 520 1053 2360
08/2013 910 487 1950 1254 479 1147 2095
07/2013 972 636 2134 1123 387 1201 2107
06/2013 877 566 1838 1255 476 1035 2057
05/2013 883 679 2094 1171 630 1206 2657
04/2013 1222 692 2119 1244 400 1636 2604
03/2013 1234 863 2858 1385 770 1181 3183
02/2013 1013 714 2914 1237 353 1235 3430
01/2013 997 821 2788 1493 715 1470 3442
 
 
2014 Jan-Apr total 3496 2575 7087 5510 1746 4176 7690
2013 Jan-Apr total 4466 3090 10679 5359 2238 5522 12659
% inc/dec (-22%) (-17%) (-34%) (+3%) (-22%) (-24%) (-39%)
 
2014 year avg/mo 859 644 1772 1378 437 1044 1923
2013 year avg/mo 971 678 2156 1310 510 1215 2515
% inc/dec (-12%) (-5%) (-18%) (+5%) (-14%) (-14%) (-24%)

*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

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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

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

↓ top contribs / desk → Computing Entertainment Humanities Language Mathematics Miscellaneous Science
1 StuRat (3602) scsbot (3569) StuRat (2636) Medeis (4003) scsbot (3134) StuRat (3845) StuRat (4399)
2 Nimur (2394) SineBot (2727) Baseball Bugs (2304) JackofOz (2527) Fly by Night (1753) Medeis (2183) Medeis (2515)
3 scsbot (2280) Baseball Bugs (2355) Medeis (2203) scsbot (1963) StuRat (1633) Baseball Bugs (2009) Wnt (1703)
4 Nil Einne (1833) Jayron32 (2073) Jayron32 (1798) Baseball Bugs (1654) PMajer (1551) SineBot (1933) Nimur (1399)
5 Finlay McWalter (1806) StuRat (1525) Alansplodge (1692) AnonMoos (1346) SineBot (1550) scsbot (1899) Jayron32 (1343)
6 SineBot (1532) JackofOz (1182) JackofOz (1572) StuRat (1282) Meni Rosenfeld (1529) JackofOz (1384) SteveBaker (1297)
7 Reisio (1462) Clarityfiend (1054) AnonMoos (1225) KageTora (1198) Bo Jacoby (1425) Jayron32 (1246) SineBot (1219)
8 Mr.98 (1191) Dismas (940) scsbot (1114) Angr (1034) Dmcq (1326) Alansplodge (1212) scsbot (1061)
9 BenRG (851) Sluzzelin (752) Futurist110 (1108) Alansplodge (935) Rckrone (976) Nil Einne (1167) Baseball Bugs (1059)
10 Bubba73 (817) Medeis (705) SineBot (1017) Jayron32 (862) Michael Hardy (951) Mr.98 (660) Plasmic Physics (782)
11 Looie496 (580) Viennese Waltz (626) Nil Einne (851) SineBot (828) Trovatore (909) HiLo48 (599) Looie496 (772)
12 Astronaut (532) Adam Bishop (552) OsmanRF34 (709) Trovatore (809) Slawekb (862) Dismas (572) SemanticMantis (685)
13 Kainaw (522) TammyMoet (546) Marketdiamond (645) Marco polo (784) Gandalf61 (667) SteveBaker (528) 24.23.196.85 (644)
14 Comet Tuttle (503) Alansplodge (543) HiLo48 (510) WhisperToMe (697) Tango (651) Miss Bono (509) Count Iblis (619)
15 Yellow1996 (476) Kainaw (521) Marco polo (454) ColinFine (586) 9258fahsflkh917fas (644) Marco polo (484) OsmanRF34 (480)

Users with 2000+ contributions

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19 users have a total of more than 2000 edits across refdesks.

user count
StuRat 18922
scsbot 15020
Medeis 11879
SineBot 10806
Baseball Bugs 9381
Jayron32 7322
JackofOz 7018
Alansplodge 4792
Nil Einne 4456
Nimur 3950
Trovatore 3101
AnonMoos 2580
Mr.98 2546
Clarityfiend 2433
Dismas 2267
HiLo48 2240
Wnt 2193
KageTora 2120
SteveBaker 2007

What now

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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. --— Rhododendrites talk |  21:28, 17 April 2014 (UTC)