Message counts, contributor counts and subscriber counts

Although the Xlists date back to 1984, accessible archiving only started in 1988. Message counts per year from that point show how traffic over the list has increased from roundly 300 postings in 1988 to around 3000 in later years. The number of active contributors also increased in the early years, but recently the active group seems to be in a shrinking phase. The graph above shows the mailflow over ten years, month by month ‚ I made it in 1997 when I started this research. Since then two more years have passed while I have been working, as you can see from the graphs below...


Xlist messages by year


Unique Xlist contributors by year

>Xlist subscribers by year

Subscriber figures are from the "masterlists" posted over the Xlist at most once a year, or, in later years such as I have requested from the xfamily staff. There are always a number of contributors who are NOT on the masterlist for the year in which they have posted one or more messages - they may have arrived later or they may have been unsubscribed when the masterlist was sampled. Presumably there will also be subscribers who subscribe and unsubscribe in silence without leaving traces in the archives. This is to some extent "artifactually" eliminated by the subscription procedure applied from Sept 1995 to Feb 1998, which resulted in a self-description from each completed subscribing procedure to be sent to the list (XMCA). The main list, XLCHC, is missing from the 1992 batch of masterlists. For those years when there were multiple subconferences, lists have been integrated so that each subscriber appears only once.



The gender distribution of the communication over the Xlists has been a recurring topic of discussion over the years. The next page shows some quantitative measures of Xlist participation by gender.

Data for the year-by-year graphs:

  1988   1989   1990   1991   1992   1993   1994   1995   1996   1997   1998   1999
messages 367 690 953 1759 1719 1798 1992 2267 3302 3130 2617 2907
contributors 80 112 140 214 255 275 260 270 281 343 199 181
subscribers
140
364 (387) 593 631 422
255 374 302

© Eva Ekeblad, June 2000