dmoz statistics - please help

Hi,

I'm doing a class project on philanthropic websites and I need to know some stats about dmoz:

1. what has the growth in editors been like in the last 3 years (i.e. how many joined in 2001, 2002 and 2003)
2. was there a growth jump in editors signing up immediately after september 11th 2001?
3. is there a growth jump in editors signing up around christmas time?

4. of the number of editors have signed up, what percentage continue to login regularly to edit (regularly = 1/month or more)

thank you

Hey, Stephanie:

Someone else will have to tell you if such statistics are available, but I wanted to offer a couple of comments on your study format. ODP is a global effort, so christmas is not necessarily going to be a trigger for everyone. In Western (more or less equals culturally christian) countries, there's typically a jump in episodic volunteering during "the christmas season", but the spike in volunteering for longterm projects (where I would class ODP, because of the application requirements) is after the new year. The other spike actually is September - "back to school" time. So you'd probably want to consider Sept 2002 and 2003 data before drawing conclusions about Sept 2001.

Hope that helps!

There have been 60 000 total editors since the project began. Some people from the very beginning are still here, and some are not.

If an editor makes no edits for 4 months then their log-in is disabled. Some of those editors have subsequently asked for reinstatement, and many were granted it.

At any time in the last few years there has always been around 10 000 active log-ins; and that figure has been quoted in several public forums, on multiple occasions.

The actual numbers leaving and joining during that time is unknown. The total active does not vary much.

Since I haven't seen those statistics as a Meta-Editor (and I really do like reading statistics), I don't think that they are available.

Just one comment regarding new editors: All Applications have to be reveiwed by a human. So the number of new editors per week depends a lot on the effort meta editors put into reviewing applications. Usually this is a rather stable amount. But from time to time (not connected with any of the dates you mentioned, maybe sometimes connected with holidays of universities [because of more spare time available], maybe even sometimes around christmas [because of the same reason]) there is a collective effort to reduce the number of applications waiting to be reviewed. So you would see a lot of unexpected changes anyway.

[Edit to add:]
And don't forget that much more important than those dates you mention are: Times of limited access to DMOZ (much less applications), articles in computer magazines (increased amount of applications), an editor talking on a conference, ...

Actually a simple trick is to go the the Wayback Machine and look up http://dmoz.org/ and http://www.newhoo.com/ (the ODP's old name). You can plot the growth there for pretty much any range of dates up until June 2003.

was there a growth jump in editors signing up immediately after september 11th 2001?

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I think that may be impossible to tell, none of the logs I can see that may shed light on that go back past 2002.

3. is there a growth jump in editors signing up around christmas time?

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No, however, some metas have holidays around that time and process more applications. But the number of submissions are the same as far as I've seen. (we don't log these sorts of things though really, very hard to answer)

4. of the number of editors have signed up, what percentage continue to login regularly to edit (regularly = 1/month or more)

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About 8%.