Talk:Community metrics/October 2012

False new contributors
Sumana says: "I know that thedj, Ori, Tychay, and ankur are NOT new contributors as of last month"
 * Fixed.--Qgil (talk) 21:46, 1 November 2012 (UTC)


 * neither is MarkAHershberger (to extensions) for that matter... Bawolff (talk) 21:19, 1 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, another case of multiple email addresses that Mark seems to be handling now. Thanks for reporting! --Qgil (talk) 21:46, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Do you know why Eranroz seems to be counted as new? He's made commits before as well and I'm not noticing more than one email address on them.--Eloquence (talk) 01:49, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
 * The reason seems to be that until September he commited as "Eranroz", while in October he changed to "eranroz". Note the lower case... I will report this to Ohloh. The reference should be the email addresses, not the usernames. I will remove him from 'new'. Good catch! --Qgil (talk) 06:22, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
 * Answer from Ohloh: "Ohloh has only tracked names coming out of source-control, mainly because it was built around CVS and Subversion. With distributed SCMs, like Git, Mercurial and Bazaar, email addresses became available but internal data model still relies on names. Reworking internal data model to make emails first class citizens has its own drawbacks and cost associated. We are trying to find a middle ground and are working on making contributions "claimable" by email and that should improve the flow for contributors." --Qgil (talk) 15:21, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

New Contributors
"'139 contributors, up +64 (85%) from previous 12 months. WMF hires and Git adoption might seem to be the main causes of this great increase. Some cases of multiple email addresses for one contributors are also suspected / expected. Still, it's a clear YoY increase.'"

I'd be interested to see how many of these +64 are actually new, non-WMF contributors. I'd also like to see the stats on new contributor growth after the switch to git. Seems like there should be some way to generate that on the site but I can't find any documentation on how their search/filter box works. --Cneubauer (talk) 12:37, 1 November 2012 (UTC)
 * The only way now to know about the new & non-WMF contributors is to go through this list. I counted 83 with a first commit done in the past 12 months. Some of those might correspond to new email addresses of old contributors. And it would take someone knowing all the WMF staff to know which ones are employees. Hopefully this changes over time as we pay more attention to top & new contributors, making sure their commits are properly claimed and affiliated. The MediaWiki page in Ohloh has a "Contributors per Month" graph and you an roll over with your mouse to see the values of each month. It does sow a clear increase after March-April, when Gerrit was deployed. Although some of that increase might come from new email addresses from current developers. Again, the data will get corrected as developers claim their work properly through their Ohloh profiles. PS: There is also an Ohloh API to retrieve data but I haven't got time (neither clear requirements) to look into it.--Qgil (talk) 16:28, 1 November 2012 (UTC)