On 6/19/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
... the *940* admins, and a million registered users, and who knows how many anonymous contributors. And that's just for the English Wikipedia! What about on de:, fr:, ja: and the rest?
See why I think we should prune all the dead registered users? Only a fraction of those claimed "million registered users" have ever even logged in and made a couple of useful edits. A tiny fraction are still logging in and making useful edits.
The last numbers I saw had roughly 2/3 of registered accounts on en: having no non-deleted edits; some might have created pages that later got deleted. (Note: user creation jumped after the restrictions on anon users creating articles were put in place.)
However, I don't think we can prune dead accounts until after single user login is implemented... some "dead" usernames were registered by people from other languages to prevent impersonation. Even then, many people have accounts solely for reading, in order to set user preferences, or to avoid getting a constant stream of "new messages" from vandalism warnings for shared IPs -- and we encourage them to do this.
-Kat
On 6/19/06, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
However, I don't think we can prune dead accounts until after single user login is implemented... some "dead" usernames were registered by people from other languages to prevent impersonation.
Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters. Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
On 6/19/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters. Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
This sounds like a hack. Can't we just add them to a "do not create" list of usernames?
Steve
Steve Bennett-8 wrote:
On 6/19/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters. Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
This sounds like a hack. Can't we just add them to a "do not create" list of usernames?
That would *be* the hack: simply creating the account and blocking it uses the current facilities to perform the task; in fact blocking is optional if the person creating it is the one who might be spoofed since they would hold the password.
HTH HAND
On 6/19/06, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
Steve Bennett-8 wrote:
On 6/19/06, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Don't forget the accounts which exist to prevent impersonation in one's main language - names with capital I's to mimic L's and Cyrillic characters. Deleting these would just open things up for abuse again.
This sounds like a hack. Can't we just add them to a "do not create" list of usernames?
That would *be* the hack: simply creating the account and blocking it uses the current facilities to perform the task; in fact blocking is optional if the person creating it is the one who might be spoofed since they would hold the password.
Of course, getting back to Kat's point - there are a lot of reasons you need a user account just to read Wikipedia - I tried accessing Wikipedia through AOL (not logged in) just to see what it was like once. Once and never again. It was a horrible experience. Ever page you clicked on had an orange bar informing you that you had messages. Click on it and it takes you to vandalism warnings. And, since you have a new IP address with the new page, yet another orange bar pops up, leading you to a NEW set of vandalism warnings... Things may have changed since I tried it, but based on that experience you NEED an account just to read Wikipedia (without too much annoyance) if you are on AOL.
Ian