Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Some Fun Charts and Graphs; Zzuuzz Catches On

I was passed a link with all these charts; here are the interesting ones.

This is a Wikimedia chart drafted by Erik Zachte of page views of the English Wikipedia; it's all broken lines because of the web-crawler traffic which they no longer count. Notice that the solid lines from March (?) of last year are plunging like a flight club Cessna after the gas ran out. Notice also that the mobile site numbers have plateaued with a slight rise around the end of last year. Remember, these are all official numbers.

Active editors, 2003-2015. Notice that most of the editors are very casual, under twenty edits in total, and that group peaked in 2007. I would guess that a lot of these people are now paid editors. The hardest of hard-core editors are a tiny cadre of maybe 1000 people, probably doing most of their edits by 'bots now. This is not a picture of a stable setup; it reminds me of the Ingsoc Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The minority of editors are in the Thought Police or the true leadership cadre, the 25+ people are the rest of the Inner Party, and the casuals are the Winston Smiths of the Outer Party.

Of course I could be wrong about the 'bots. Notice how they have been muddling along at 30-25,000 articles and slowly dropping since 2010. I don't know what they count as a "new article" and if the "reg" users are counted as "regs" if they use 'bots. Erik Zachte needs to be talked to, to find out what the hell he meant.


I put the crappy red circle around number two because they were talking about "event logging" at this WMF meeting a few years ago. What that means is they want to track users and kick out IPs of people they don't like. Their only problem is that the Wikipedia Alexa score would drop if they started scanning IPs against a digital shitlist (the site would slow down), so for the Almighty Standings they only go after the editors they don't like and leave the readers alone. That might change if the method of counting views shifts. Which might be never.

***

From Drmies talkpage:

Hi Drmies, is this [6] (off-wiki) harassment? Seems to be pretty recent (last Dec)? Actually the entire blog seems to be anti. Horseless Headman (talk) 17:44, 24 January 2016 (UTC).

Yeah, typical. One of those people with nothing better to do. Unless we figure out who this is there's little we can do, of course. Zzuuzz, you have a fan out on the internet. For the record, Zzuuzz is one of those cats who has done more to keep this website running than a lot of people I know. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 03:04, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks both. My fan club. I must be improving - I've had entire blogs dedicated to me in the past. -- zzuuzz (talk) 07:59, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I do kind of need to know if the fan club is official or not--I'm trying to figure out if I can add it to the EL section of your article. Drmies (talk) 15:35, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Wow zzuuzz, please keep up the good work! Even if that means having fans out there :-( Horseless Headman (talk) 15:15, 25 January 2016 (UTC).


Let me say that is really cute, the line "[u]nless we figure out who this is there's little we can do....", like they are willing to go on a DDOS crusade to knock this website down, not realizing that the information can be mirrored over and over again. That also shows their true contempt for even the most casual level of journalism; if I really wanted to get Zzuzz I would be using detective techniques and online blackhattery. I will give Drmies this one clue: I was never on Wikipedia, not even as an IP. Go at it Hercule Poirot!

3 comments:

  1. "Priscilla Raji" is a half-human spambot; a program cuts and pastes these badly-written spamagraphs into comment threads, then she clicks the "I am not a robot" popup to post them. She works at the Pakistani spam mills, no doubt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (It was an erectile-dysfunction ad that I deleted, because FUCK SPAMMERS.)

      Delete
    2. Not nearly as fun as "Lovely spam, wonderful spa-a-m."

      Thanks for selecting and explaining the charts.

      Delete