On 12/4/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
You need to register an account if you want to set your preferences - Wikipedia has more readers than writers, there are probably a number of people who are familiar enough with the site to know this, but have no interest in editing.
Do we have any numbers? Can we count the number of people in each of these categories:
1) Never logged in 2) Logged in but never changed anything 3) Set preferences, but never edited 4) Edited, but not in main articlespace 5) Made at least one edit in main article space
To my mind, those in categories 1-3 should not be hogging valuable user names if those in 5 want them. Exceptions of course for people protecting established user names from other wikipedias, but they can edit their own user page to solve that...
The other issue is one of authorship. We can't re-use an account that has made any edits, so what's the benefit in deleting accounts which haven't been used in a while?
Reattributing edits is primarily a technical problem.
Steve