User talk:Sean.hoyland

Khirbet 'Ein Karzaliyah (Arabic: خربة عين كرزلية), Jordan Valley: December 2013 - January 2014

Id'eis (Arabic: ادعيس), Jordan Valley: May 2014

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Question

Hi, Idk whether it is possible, is there any way to establish whether there are more editors participating in the topic area pre October 2023 compared to recent times? My own perception (top of my head, already determined as of dubious reliability), based on looking at an RSN discussion like ADL or AJ and discussions at articles like Gaza genocide is that there seem to be more but it would be nice to show that somehow. Selfstudier (talk) 10:03, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, this raises the question "what precisely is the topic area?", a technical black hole that I have been orbiting for a while now. I thought maybe I can just traverse a graph, but it always seems to end with something like "How did I get here, an article about a biscuit?" etc. Another approach is to pretend that everything in the topic area has one of the talk page templates and look for those. It might be possible to come up with something tracking the number of unique editors for articles with the templates over time. Seems like the kind of thing where limiting the scope to a relatively small number of pages, at least to start with, might be a sensible approach. Do you think there's a list of articles that would be represent a decent sample of the topic area? Sean.hoyland (talk) 11:19, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe you could do something via the cats? Category:Arab–Israeli_conflict would be the top of a tree (a sort of graph, right?). To limit the number, drop down to Category:Israeli–Palestinian_conflict but that might still be a lot. Selfstudier (talk) 11:32, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The graphs rapidly get big. This is with root category Arab–Israeli conflict and a 2 level descent through the hierarchy. Sean.hoyland (talk) 12:02, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Very Mandelbrotty :) OK, let me think about a hotlist. Selfstudier (talk) 12:24, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

btw, the yellow things are things without ArbCom_Arab-Israeli_enforcement, Contentious_topics/Arab-Israeli_talk_notice templates or their equivalents. Sean.hoyland (talk) 12:43, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am currently using the intersection of Wikipedia:WikiProject Israel and Wikipedia:WikiProject Palestine. So far, it seems reasonably accurate. BilledMammal (talk) 12:28, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea, thanks. I'll have a look. Sean.hoyland (talk) 12:43, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You could Take the articles that I have "bludgeoned" here as a hotlist. Selfstudier (talk) 13:08, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Or Nishidani's new articles since October 2023 Selfstudier (talk) 14:57, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Will have a think about it. Sean.hoyland (talk) 15:09, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be possible. Here's an example plot for a single article (Zionism) going back a few years as a test (not handling data gaps in that plot). This is counting unique editors for the article and talk page combined. I'll do a multi-article version when I get a chance. Sean.hoyland (talk) 17:42, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, very good, I would be most interested to see if that pattern is repeated. Selfstudier (talk) 18:30, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Seems hard to make a performant query that looks at thousands of pages, possibly due to a combination of SQL incompetence, being too lazy to look at the data model and indexing and my brain not working because it's a 'feels like' temperature of 42C today. Anyway, in the meantime, here's a plot for about 3800 articles (excluding talk pages) in the topic area. It would be nice to be able to normalize the data using stats for the number of unique active editors for all of Wikipedia over time or at least have some kind of trend comparison...but I have no idea where or how to get that data. Maybe I could randomly select a much bigger set of articles and compare it to that. Sean.hoyland (talk) 08:30, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Don't overdo it, lol. Could you just do a few more? Like the Israel Hamas war, Gaza genocide, "hot" articles? While it's not conclusive without more data, I just want to get a sense if the editor count has gone up. Selfstudier (talk) 09:42, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Righty dokey. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:58, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can you see these? Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:36, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I can, on pop up or larger view. Let me go through them. Selfstudier (talk) 10:42, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Let me know if you have other articles in mind. Only takes a couple of seconds to make a plot. Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:51, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

They confirm the trend, the Israel Hamas war is less useful because it is a new article, altho it is possible to see the large number (1600!) at the beginning, but now dropped off (relatively speaking, still near 200). Selfstudier (talk) 10:52, 21 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]