On 17 March 2013 13:55, Jan Ainali jan.ainali@wikimedia.se wrote:
How come the historical statistics vary over time? Last month I looked at the statistics for Swedish Wikipedia and it had 132 new Wikipedians in December 2012 and 142 for November. When the January stats came now it says it was 139 in December and 144 in November. How is that possible?
"New Wikipedians" counts people who have edited at least ten times since registering an account; however, they don't have to make all ten edits in that month.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm
So if someone registers in December and makes two edits, they won't show up on that list; if they come back in January and make eight more, then when the stats are recalculated they'll show up as a new user for December.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk