User blog:Lordganon/State of the Wiki, 2013

Various claims on the part of a few users got me thinking about this a few months back. While I could see they were wrong, they couldn't.

So, I figured that once the year ended, and a bit of time had passed - and, wikia fixed the problem they were having with their archives - that I'd share some data from the last year.

So, here we go!

In this last year, we hit a new record for users editing in a month, in May. For that matter, in the February and April before that, we set new records as well. Prior to then, it had actually been the number established in the last month of 2011. So, in the span of a year, our record number for users editing in a month went from 180, to 182, to 194, and then to 255. The next three months after our record ran in the 200-220 range, and we've settled at a mark just over 190 since then. So, a net increase this year, too.

That May, however, did not give us our record number of edits in a month - last April, in fact, did. Both numbers are just a hair over 14k. Like the amount of editors, new records for this were established in the months before then this year, with more than 12k in March. Prior to that, the record was a bit over 10k in November of 2011.

Not sure why we had such an increase, but most of the stats categories have it this summer. If memory serves, that's when wikia finally got the promo out that I asked them to do - which they agreed to - in February. So that may well be the reason why. But pretty much every category that could have a record did set new ones last summer, so it worked, whatever it was.

Overall, that's a lot of good news.

Now, on the statistics wikia gives us, there are three sections, divided into eight categories. These are:


 * Registered Editors
 * Total (Total number of users editing pages of any kind on the wiki)
 * Content (Number of users editing content)
 * Edits (Editors with more than 5 edits that month)
 * Edits (Editors with more than 100 edits that month)
 * Articles (excludes redirects)
 * Total (overall number of articles on the wiki, is more or less what the one on the front pages says)
 * Edits (Number of times articles have been edited)
 * Images & Video
 * Images (Total amount of images uploaded to the wiki)
 * Video (Total amount of videos uploaded to the wiki)

In the listings, these are listed for every month, going back to the beginning of 2008. Below that table, there's also one more, with the same layout, that lists the changes in terms of percentage, rather than the hard numbers. It's not as helpful, of course.

Data is gathered and added to each month's statistics every day.

Note that, to the best of my knowledge, the editor numbers do not include anons - but don't quote me on that one. Obviously, of course, articles, images uploaded, etc. by them are still included.

The difference between the data for the end of 2011, and the end of 2012, is rather striking.

The number of editors, overall, went up about 10.5% over the year. Now, I admit that is a few percent less than the year before, in theory, but our traffic ended 2010 on a low point for some reason, and ended 2011 on a high point - if you discount those, the overall picture says that the numbers went up more last year than the year before that. To put that into perspective, that'd be like using our 255 number for last May as an indicator of progress in comparison to the May before that - it makes the year before that look like we increased in size more than we did.

The number of these users that edited content was up about 9.3% over the course of last year, with a high in May of 224. We've been running (usually) 82-89% of all editors editing content, like with 224/255 in May (87.8%) for years, in a very slight upward trend. Overall, for the year, we averaged these numbers at 84.88% of users editing the wiki editing actual content.

Users editing things between 5 and 100 times went up by 12%. Those making more than a hundred such edits increased in number by 31.8%, a slight improvement over 29.4% the year prior. Highs of 146 and 35 were reached in June and May, respectively.

The number of articles went up 31.66% in 2012. Not the record increase in the listings - some of the 2008 and 2009 data is very large in this regard - but very healthy.

The number of edits (per month) went up 36.3% last year. The percentage here, like with the rate of article increase, isn't a record, for pretty much the same reasons.

With the total number of images, we also saw a good increase, going up 7.1%. Now, we had a large amount of duplicate images removed over 2011 - Well done, Nuke! - so that year was actually down 19 images overall. Going by the low point that year, I can definitely say that we went up at least 3.2%, however.

Now, the videos section has been "errored out" since April, stuck at 113 of them. That being said, I know that we've had a bunch uploaded in that time span. Not that I can really figure out the number, of course, given all the categories things are in. In any case, the video number went up at least 20.2% on the year, so the number is probably comparable to the 49% from the year before.

So, there you have it guys. We're doing pretty good, overall. The January numbers looked good, and the February ones look to be very promising, as well. Not that I'm going to say exactly how good until next year, of course ;)