Wikimedia Foundation/PAR

This is a Participatory Action Research project which involves participants adopting a persona, and creating suitable records of their activities on one or more of the Wikimedia Foundation resources:
 * Wikibooks
 * Wikipedia
 * Wiktionary
 * Wikiquote
 * Wikisource
 * Meta
 * Wikimedia Commons
 * wikispecies
 * Wikinews

Index of Inactivity
(copied from talk page)

Do you know what an edit summary is? --JWSchmidt 13:23, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

There is no page on it as such, but User:B9 hummingbird hovering mentions it on Lesson Two: Wiki and Wikiversity crashcourse. Harrypotter 14:07, 27 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Why don't you write edit summaries for your edits? --JWSchmidt 17:23, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether User:B9 hummingbird hovering's phrase "User:B9 hummingbird hovering" quite captures the nub of the cause. Maybe it's because I'm a wikignome that I don't want to draw attention to what I am doing. If you like I could use the "This is a minor edit" button, if you feel that is appropriate. But if you want to go the whole hog, as it were, if you could produce a little Gnome to shre with the community, I'm sure that not only myself, but all the other poor gnomes drawn to wikiversity would be able to a significant role in developing the community without troubling those in the community more critical of our foibles.Harrypotter 19:47, 27 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what you are saying. Are you saying that when you remove content from Wikiversity learning resources you don't want to draw attention to what you are doing? When you remove content from a Wikiversity page, please provide an edit summary that explains why you are removing the content. --JWSchmidt 14:42, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't so much remove content but archive material which has been inactive, sometimes for as much as a year or two. If you feel it would be useful for me to put notes in the edit summary I'll try to remember
 * I am not aware of any time limit on Wikiversity page contents. If you are removing content from Wikiversity learning resources because it is "inactive" then please explain the measures of inactivity that you are using. --JWSchmidt 19:41, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * [[Image:William Fettes Douglas - The Alchemist.jpg|thumb|right|200px| "This is my retort!" An Alchemist researching into "measures of inactivity"]]Well, I am not aware of any time limit either. Perhaps if you inquire on the Colloquium you can find out if there has been any discussion of this. As regards any "measures of inactivity" perhaps that would be better discussed here: Inactive Pages or here Inactive pages (I'm not sure which would be the most appropriate). For myself, I have not created any such measures. However feel free to propose such measures and see how others respond. As regards myself, please feel free to measure the inactivity present in each of my edits. They can be accessed here: Harrypotter's Edits. However, it may be useful to look at one example. Let's go with British Empire:

These three edits I would not regard as substantive, more like moving around the deckchairs on Marie Celeste Editor Erikgunby was kind enough to add the history tag, which I retained, so no issue there. Editor Faithlessthewonderboy has only made one edit on Wikiversity, and this was it: a reversion of the one edit from IP 169.139.98.194. So my actions in no way impinge there either. So this takes us back to Editor Jade Knight, who made an edit on 19 September 2008, a date rapidly approaching its second anniversary. I'll leave you to calculate the exact number of days which elapsed until 12 August 2010. Of course such a measure would be inadequate on its own without consideration of the content. Obviously well prepared material which had remained untouched for eons could be very useful - just think where we would be without the Rossetta Stone! One heading was nothing more than that, a hallmark of incompleteness. All told the headings had the following number of words:
 * 1) (cur | prev)  16:46, 26 July 2010 Erikgunby (Talk | contribs) (5,046 bytes) (undo)
 * 2) (cur | prev) 13:29, 30 December 2009 Faithlessthewonderboy (Talk | contribs) (5,033 bytes) (Undo revision 496876 by 169.139.98.194 (Talk)) (undo)
 * 3) (cur | prev) 11:57, 27 October 2009 169.139.98.194 (Talk) (4,567 bytes) (→Decline) (undo)


 * 1) Definition: 147
 * 2) English Imperialism as Precursor to British Imperialism: 184
 * 3) Pre-conditions for empire: 66
 * 4) First forays: 0
 * 5) Build up: 73
 * 6) Decline 79


 * Average: 91.5 words

I'm not sure how useful this figure might be in generating a measure of incompleteness, but I feel that incompleteness implies a lack of activity, and where there has not been any edits for XXX days, then if we were to multiply the quotient of incompleteness by this number of days, we might get indices of inactivity. Would this give you the sort of measure your after? Perhaps some could devise a bot to do this with all pages so that we could have the indices of inactivity placed on the talk page, perhaps updated monthly, quarterly, I don't know. . . what would you prefer? The problem I think would come from measuring incompleteness in a way which goes beyond protoscience. This seems to be an are in which you seem to already have considerable knowledge. Why not get cracking and come up with a workable conceptualisation, and then maybe someone far cleverer than me could devise the bot?Harrypotter 20:56, 28 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Since you admit to not knowing what you are doing, I will simply revert all of your unexplained removals of content from Wikiversity learning resources. --JWSchmidt 13:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)


 * You might find that highly dysfunctional. I Know exactly what I am doing - it is all recorded in my edits, to which I have referred you. However I have not applied an abstract a priori pseudo-scientific schema, which I regard as inappropriate. Please do not proceed in this fashion. Pehaps you are muddling me up with User:Erkan Yilmaz? Your friend, Harrypotter 15:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)