Community

Wikipedia's labor market is the pool of editors who contribute their time and expertise. Like a real economy, the wiki has hiring (new arrivals), attrition (departures), and a workforce whose size and composition shift over time. This page tracks active editor identities, their user types, churn dynamics, and long-term cohort retention: the vital signs of the community's labor supply.

Active Editor Identities
Total Edits
Arrival Rate
Departure Rate

Workforce Over Time

Active editor identities per period. This is an exact wiki-wide distinct count for the selected month, quarter, or year; it is not a sum of namespace or monthly counts. The namespace filter therefore does not apply to this chart.

How is this calculated?

Active Editor Identities = COUNT(DISTINCT canonical_editor_identity) per period

An identity is counted once per wiki and selected period even if it edits in multiple namespaces or months. Permanent and temporary accounts use their user ID; historical IP actors use their actor text internally. The grouping identity is never published. An account or IP actor is not necessarily one person, and cross-wiki totals remain editor–wiki observations because local actor IDs are not a safe global identity.

Workforce by User Type

Same metric broken down by editor classification. The temporary accounts category reflects Wikimedia's migration of logged-out editors from public IP actors to temporary accounts, not by itself a real change in editing behavior.

How is this calculated?

Editor Identities(type) = COUNT(DISTINCT canonical_editor_identity) WHERE user_type = type

Same exact wiki-wide identity count broken down by classification: registered (permanent account), temporary (browser-bound temporary account), anonymous (historical IP actor), and bot (flagged bot account). All types are shown regardless of the user-type filter. These identity classes are not interchangeable estimates of people.

Churn Rate

Churn measures the flow of editors in and out of the community. A healthy wiki maintains a balance between arrivals and departures. When departures consistently exceed arrivals, the workforce is shrinking.

Caveat: The last period's departure rate is artificially high, since editors whose last edit is recent aren't necessarily gone. Registered editors only.
How is this calculated?

Arrival Rate = New Editors (first edit in period) / Active Editors × 100% Departure Rate = Departing Editors (last edit in period) / Active Editors × 100%

Arrival rate = editors whose first-ever edit falls in this period / total active editors. Departure rate = editors whose last-ever edit falls in this period / total active editors. Registered editors only. Computed separately per granularity in Rust to avoid invalid cross-granularity aggregation.

Cohort Retention

Survival heatmap for registered editors. Each row is a cohort (year of first edit). Colors show what fraction of that cohort is still around (last edit in that year or later). The last column is partial data. The "n=" column shows initial cohort size; small cohorts can produce misleading stability.
How is this calculated?

Survival(cohort, year) = Editors with last_edit ≥ year / Initial Cohort Size × 100%

Survival-based retention. Each editor is assigned to the cohort of their first edit year. "Survived to year Y" means their last edit is in year Y or later. The metric is monotonically decreasing by design: once an editor's last-edit year is passed, they drop out permanently. The "n=" column shows initial cohort size; small cohorts (< 20) can produce misleading retention curves.

Survival Summary