Matthew Flaschen wrote:
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).
For me, such editors are part of our community of volunteers. Only accounts used for non-constructive edits wouldn't be part of it, hence logic dictates they would be vandal-only accounts.
Of course, we may dispute whether all volunteers are a part of community; but the main point here is whether the current official Wikimedia Foundation number of "a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers" isn't a serious under estimation?
Do we know the global edit redistribution per users? I.e. how many users made 0 edits, how many made 1, how many made 10,000... a graph would be quite useful.
-- Piotr