Piotr Konieczny wrote:
Getting any reliable estimates on our community has
always been
difficult. However, recently, in official Wikimedia Foundation
announcements and such (ex.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en?utm_source=2008_jimmy_…)
the number "a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers"
appeared. I would very much like to now - what date is it based on?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians gives 8.5 million
registered accounts. Of course many of those are duplicates, but then
there are many unregistered contributors... still, my own guesstimate
would be at at least half a million - if not several millions - of
people who had edited Wikipedia (in any language, ove the past ~8
years).
No doubt, millions of people have edited some version of Wikipedia, with
constructive intent.
This guesstimate is based on analysis of a small sample of
editors I know and how many accounts they've
created (which for a vast
majority is ONE). Sure, there are sockpuppet vandals, but... do we
really have 150,000 volunteers, maybe as much legitimate socks/bots, and
over 8 millions vandal sockpuppet accounts???
I'm not at all clear how you arrived at the figure "8 millions vandal
sockpuppet accounts", nor what you mean by it. However, it doesn't
follow from the figures you've cited. Rather, I believe most of the 8.5
million user accounts are simply inactive. Someone made an edit,
constructive or not, then left, and did not return with that account (at
least not yet).
Matt Flaschen