Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-17/Cobwebs

Editor's note: I don't know how in tarnation this never ended up getting published. When I rewrote some templates to better categorize Signpost drafts, it revealed that this had been languishing in the doldrums for quite some time. Oopsies woopsies!!! Anyway, it is a fine piece, and here it is. —J

*Desktop views and mobile views as per toolforge pageviews and massviews analysis

The Signpost in 2020, our sixteenth year of publication, contained twelve issues and 161 articles, compared to the 155 articles of 2019. This article reports data on articles, contributors, pageviews, and comments from 2020 and compares them to data from previous issues.

The 161 articles of 2020, created by 88 Wikipedia users, received a total of 330,911 pageviews. Adding in views from the first page and the single-page edition, the total pageviews reached 354,786. This is a decrease of 110,574 views from last year. This is also a five year low. The twelve issues have seen comments totaling 122041 words. This is a decrease from last year by 2,735 words. Despite the noticeable fall in views, the amount of discussion has remained relatively stable.

A sharp fall in views is seen in the view count from the third and fourth issues. This general fall remained visible until the end of the year. Further 2021 signaled a five year low in total view count.

• 
  Orange highlight represents pageviews of the top two articles while blue represents pageviews for the remaining.

How many users have contributed to The Signpost in 2020?

• 10 Signpost contributors in 2020 account for around 52% of the total byline mentions, with the remaining 77+ users accounting for the remaining byline mentions. However this does not include the additional 831 editors if you count articles such as the essay Wikipedia:An article about yourself isn't necessarily a good thing or the humour collaboration Cherchez une femme from the French Wikipedia.
• The contributions of the top 10 are similar to last year.

What about the state of comments and discussion in The Signpost in 2020?

Articles with the most discussion:

• Most words:

• Op-Ed: Re-righting Wikipedia: 7509 words
• Op-Ed: Anti-vandalism with masked IPs: the steps forward: 7235 words

• Most participants:

• From the editor: Reaching six million articles is great, but we need a moratorium: 46 unique editors
• News and notes: Jimmy Wales "shouldn't be kicked out before he's ready": 31 unique editors

85% of Signpost views are from desktop devices: For the period 27 January 2020 to 18 February 2021 and considering all issues of volume 16, 85% of Signpost views came from desktop. The remaining 15% views came from mobile views (mainly mobile web views and relatively negligible mobile app views). For comparison Wikipedia articles get around 35% to 60% of views from desktop as per the sample I have taken. It is also interesting to note that out of a sample of ~62M edits on the English Wikipedia taken in a study by Ainali, 10% of the edits were from mobile devices. Do Signpost creators use mobile or desktop to create their articles?

Q. What do Signpost outliers have in common?

Ans. Here are a few observations related to outliers:

1. Outliers reach an internal audience wider than the usual Signpost readers through discussion on multiple fora such as RfC or MfD.
   • Examples: Humour: Pesky Pronouns/ The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia
2. Outliers reach an external audience which in turn can drive external conversation.
   • Examples: Wikipedia has cancer/ Cryptos and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!/ The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia
3. Outliers can be highly controversial resulting in point one or two.
   • Examples: Humour: Pesky Pronouns

The following input from Smallbones helped explain some of the statistical attributes of the Signpost data. The distribution of any data related to Wikipedia pageviews is "normally highly non-normal", i.e. it's usually highly skewed to the right and non-Gaussian. The skew to the right - some unusually big numbers or "outliers" - makes some usual statistical tools - like average (mean) - difficult to interpret.

The cause of the skew might be: some rather very good or very bad journalism! Internal controversy - which was really good (or bad) for us to have brought up. We touched a nerve. Posting links on other platforms, which can be good - an indication of quality journalism and interest by the outside world, or bad - somebody is trying to manipulate our pageviews or trying to make some type of point. The concept of outliers was expanded to this report after it was suggested by Smallbones in 2019.

When conjuring up this article, I noticed that it inadvertently involved bingeing on the Signpost. I wonder if anyone else has done so. I have my reason, what was yours?

Part data: Signpost Statistics 2020; via toolforge pageviews massviews

Notes