On 22/03/2008, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
According to [[sv:Special:Statistics]] there are 58,087 user accounts, but <contributor><username> has 28,416 distinct values. Is it realistic that half of all registered usernames have never contributed a single edit (to non-deleted pages)? Can we find out what happened to them? Did they write spam that was deleted and the username permanently blocked? Did they just register their name to stop others from doing so? Or did something go wrong during the registration? Of those who did contribute something, of course most usernames only made very few contributions. This is a long tail. So how do we separate the regular/serious/active contributors from the occassional ones? In [[m:board elections]] to the WMF, a limit of 400 edits is used, and this threshold is as good as any. I think 800 is the number of volunteers that should be mentioned rather than the 58,087 mostly inactive usernames.
*Yes please*. Or something like it. The bogus number of users on Special:Statistics is widely quoted in the press even though almost all of them are spammer, vandal or troll accounts. "xx users with over 400 edits" would be ideal. Or over some number. Something meaningful.
- d.