users were placed into categories based on their rates of editing
@JSutherland (WMF), interesting article. Can you clarify whether these categories were based on edits to WP as a whole each day or edits to the Shooting article in specific? The most curious finding to my eyes was the comparative lack of edits in the verdict's traffic spike, which is kind of amazing and worth communicating to those worried about editor dropoff. On one hand, it's logical that there's not much new info to add apart from the verdict itself, but one would think that the pure number of eyeballs (traffic) would remind more editors to fix citations and clean the whole thing up, similar to how it first started. (Was the page protected in the traffic spike periods? Would be worth noting.) A bunch of empty pages are enticing to edit, especially to users who may know something about the topic, but once an article starts to build up, there's less a reason (or "need") to bulk it up. I'd also posit that featured articles, with their length and "brilliant" verbosity, look so pristine that editors are naturally discouraged from touching them, feeling no need to disrupt the order. If you do continue with the qualitative analysis, I would be curious whether the WMF finds that people read more/less of an article when it reaches that saturation state, or if it just makes them read the lede and skim one or two relevant parts instead of reading as much as they would of a smaller article. I've written lots of peer reviewed content here and I find that my own eyes glaze over at the walls of perfectly cited text, so I've come to prefer concision over completeness. It's one thing to worry about editor participation (as tied to rate of edits) and another to question how content quality actually affects the end product: readers reading. – czar 18:47, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
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