Marco Schuster wrote:
Lars Aronsson schrieb:
Out of the 6.7 million registered user names on the English Wikipedia, some 4.4 million had never completed a single edit.
IMO Wikipedia could do the same as many boards do: purge accounts after a time of inactivity.
I don't agree. First, edits are not the only kind of activity. You can register an account to change personal settings that you use for reading. For example, I might want to read (look at) the Vietnamese Wikipedia even though I don't edit it. Second, such a passive but useful account can be inactive (no edit, no login, nothing) for several years.
My point, however, is that we shouldn't brag that en.wp has 6.7 million contributors, because only 2.3 million have edited. Far fewer have made more than a handful edits, useful edits in the article namespace, that weren't reverted. The size of our "volunteer community" is probably a lot smaller.