Wouldn't someone leaving & returning as a new username be a loss of 1 and a gain of 1? Thereby being a net change of zero?
I'm sure there is some username churn in the stats, but I'd be surprised if it was a significant portion (more than 1%) of tens of thousands of users.
-Jon
On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 17:27, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Ting,
One of the things I wondered about the editor trends study is whether it focused only on user names, as opposed to people.
It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit."
A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new identities, sometimes multiple ones. Any regular editor will tell you that this happens a lot, for various reasons. Accounts are banned; privacy is compromised; people acquire a certain reputation with an account and want to start over; or they want a break from being User X, for whatever reason, and become User Y for a while.
Did the study do anything to correlate number of accounts with number of people?
Sarah
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