{"id":2100,"date":"2012-11-03T09:31:10","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T13:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=2100"},"modified":"2013-12-16T17:10:09","modified_gmt":"2013-12-16T22:10:09","slug":"libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-2-community-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-2-community-size.html","title":{"rendered":"LibreOffice\u2019s Dubious Claims: Part 2, Community Size"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(This post represents my personal opinion only.\u00a0 The <a href=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/who-is-rob-weir\">standard disclaimer<\/a> applies.)<\/p>\n<p>In a previous post I looked at how <a href=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/2012\/10\/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-i-downloads.html\">LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats<\/a>, claiming to have far more users than it actually has.\u00a0 Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives were peddling anything other than the plain, honest truth.\u00a0 No one seemed to noticed that the claims\u00a0 did not pass the&#8221; sniff test&#8221;.\u00a0 No one investigated more deeply.\u00a0 Until now.\u00a0 I hope that after reading these posts that you, gentle reader, will exercise your brain the next time you read a press release or blog post from LibreOffice, and try harder to separate fact from fiction.\u00a0 It will not be easy.<\/p>\n<p>In this post I&#8217;m taking a look at another set of claims, those concerning the size of the LibreOffice community.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll lay out the plain facts and the analysis and invite contradictions or confirmations.\u00a0 In return I&#8217;ll probably get more personal attacks, but that comes with the territory.\u00a0 The LibreOffice marketing lead has already declared me personally to me their <a href=\"http:\/\/listarchives.libreoffice.org\/global\/marketing\/msg06246.html\">number one enemy<\/a>.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure Microsoft is comforted by this thought.<\/p>\n<h3>The Claims<\/h3>\n<p>LibreOffice, from the start, has made incredible claims as to the size of its volunteer base.\u00a0 The claims read like something from ancient battle accounts, with men 10-feet tall and armies of 500,000.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, in a <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.documentfoundation.org\/2012\/10\/17\/conference-announcements\/\">recent blog post<\/a>, LibreOffice makes the following claims:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;We are now a family of thousands of contributors around the globe&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>They have &#8220;&#8230;an even larger number of active volunteers taking care of localizations, quality assurance, community development and marketing at global and local levels&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>And that these additional volunteers are &#8220;a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As is common with LibreOffice announcements, these claims are made without definitions, without a stated methodology, without context.\u00a0 So the innocent reader might read terms like &#8220;family of contributors&#8221; or &#8220;active volunteers&#8221; or &#8220;community&#8221; and think these terms are used in their ordinary sense.\u00a0 But they are not, as we shall see.<\/p>\n<h3>The Mythical Wiki Army of 3000<\/h3>\n<p>The key to finding the 3000 contributors claimed by LibreOffice is to note the fine print of their <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.documentfoundation.org\/2012\/10\/17\/conference-announcements\/\">blog post<\/a>, where they say of the additional volunteers:\u00a0 &#8220;Overall, the number of these people is over 3,000, if we take as a measure those who have contributed to the project wiki.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ah, so to the wiki we go now to seek out this mighty army of 3000.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a look at their<a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.documentfoundation.org\/Special:Statistics\"> wiki stats<\/a> then.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll give a screen shot in case this page becomes unavailable:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/wiki-stats.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-2101\" title=\"wiki-stats\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/wiki-stats.jpg\" width=\"458\" height=\"463\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/wiki-stats.jpg 458w, https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/wiki-stats-296x300.jpg 296w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 458px) 100vw, 458px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So as you see, they do indeed have 3,510 &#8220;registered users&#8221;.\u00a0 So their blog post was correct, end of story.\u00a0\u00a0 They indeed have &#8220;a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents&#8221;.\u00a0 Right?<\/p>\n<p>Not so quick.\u00a0 There is less here than meets the eye.\u00a0 Far less. \u00a0 Let&#8217;s look at some problems with this figure:<\/p>\n<p>First, the sniff test.\u00a0 If you had a community of 3500 wiki contributors, would after 2 years your wiki have only 2160 content pages?\u00a0 Is this the output one would expect from a community that size?\u00a0 Less than one half-page per contributor per year, from this &#8220;larger number of active volunteers&#8221; ?\u00a0 This disconnect between claims and reality should be enough to warrant a closer examination.\u00a0 This just doesn&#8217;t sound credible.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately the wiki stats allow us to see exactly how many edits each registered user made to the wiki.\u00a0 Curiously, of this &#8220;community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continent&#8221;, 1777 of them (over half) have made zero edits.\u00a0 Zero, zip, gar nichts, nada, niente, zilch.\u00a0 This is quite remarkable.\u00a0 A community of contributors where half have made no contributions?!\u00a0 Is that what you commonly think of when you read the phrase &#8220;active contributor&#8221; in a press release?\u00a0 Evidently, in LibreLand you do.<\/p>\n<p>Further, there are many users with a single edit, accounts like Cashloans121, Fastloans1, Fastloans2, etc.\u00a0 Interesting names, yes?\u00a0 Of course, these are the spam accounts, created so that advertising could be added to User or other pages.\u00a0\u00a0 It is also common for users to register and to make no other &#8220;contribution&#8221; than to put their C.V. on their User page.\u00a0 I won&#8217;t embarrass the individuals users who have done this, but I see many examples of this on the LibreOffice wiki, where the only &#8220;contribution&#8221; from a user is self-promotion. \u00a0 In total, 583 of the registered users made only a single edit in the past two years.\u00a0\u00a0 449 have made only 2 edits.\u00a0 Sadly, our army of 3000 &#8220;active volunteers&#8221; is shrinking at a distressing rate.<\/p>\n<p>Spam and other issues are well-known to organizations that use wikis.\u00a0 You don&#8217;t claim that your community consists of all registered users of the wiki.\u00a0 To make a claim like that in a press release is deceptive.\u00a0 It is a statistic that has no relation to reality.\u00a0\u00a0 If the Apache OpenOffice project did exactly what LibreOffice did, and claimed its community size based on the number of registered wiki users, it could claim it had <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.openoffice.org\/wiki\/Special:Statistics\">over 75 thousand contributors!<\/a><\/p>\n<p>So what is one to do, with such messy data?\u00a0 Certainly claiming 3,000 contributors without any caution about the above concerns is not recommended.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead, if the phrase &#8220;active volunteer&#8221; is more than empty syllables you need to apply some reasonable threshold to separate an active member of the community from spam, empty registrations or volunteers that showed up for one day and were never seen again.<\/p>\n<p>One criterion is suggested by MediaWiki itself, in its stats report.\u00a0 It shows that LibreOffice has 112 &#8220;active users&#8221;, which it defines as users who have made a contribution in the last month.\u00a0 Another technique might be to look at users who have made, say some non-trivial contribution, say 10 page edits in the past two years, in which case you will show 343 active contributors.\u00a0 Another way is to ask how many contributors combined account for 90% of all of the edits.\u00a0 I prefer that metric, and the answer in this case is 342 active contributors.\u00a0\u00a0 But the only way you can claim\u00a0 &#8220;a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents&#8221; is to have a disregard for facts, and also a disrespect for your reader.\u00a0 You burn credibility, one of the most important assets an open source project can have.<\/p>\n<p>However you slice it, LibreOffice is overstating the size of their active contributor community by a factor of 10.<\/p>\n<p>(This post represents my personal opinion only.\u00a0 The <a href=\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/who-is-rob-weir\">standard disclaimer<\/a> applies.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(This post represents my personal opinion only.\u00a0 The standard disclaimer applies.) In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has.\u00a0 Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-fud","7":"category-openoffice","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2113,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions\/2113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}