User:Selket/User edits

Much attention has been paid recently to the number of Wikipedia main namespace edits users have, particularly in RfAs. I thought it would be useful to quantify how exclusive a particular number of edits is as a mechanism for evaluating whether we are putting reasonable conditions on our applicants. This investigation has led to some notable findings.

All of the data presented below comes from the November 4, 2006 database dump. I consider only edits made by registered users.

Users by edit count

This plot is a histogram of the number of users making a particular number of mainspace edits. Note the exponential drop off as number of edits increases. I start the plot at 10 edits, but it looks similar to the left of 10. A majority of the registered users have made zero edits in the main namespace.

Key percentiles

Percent of Wikipedia users making at least n edits

Number of Edits	Percentile
30	95
370	99
500	99.21
1500	99.75
5000	99.91

Interesting findings

• The mean number of edits per user is 15.2
• The median and mode number of edits are both zero
• 50% of the edits have been made by 0.2% of the registered editors
  • That is, those 942 users with more than 2534 edits