[Foundation-l] A dangerous precedent

[Matthew Britton]

Milos Rancic wrote:
> On 12/29/07, Matthew Britton <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> Milos Rancic wrote:
>>> - "if not millions" is also a poetic nonsense. Please, read some
>>> statistics [2] before expressing such bold "facts".
>> The English Wikipedia has more than six million registered user
>> accounts. About 50 editions of Wikipedia have more than 1000 registered
>> user accounts. Content has thus been added by thousands of users in
>> about 50 cases, and millions in at least one case. In what way does this
>> constitute "poetic nonsense"?
> 
> You said "if not millions of contributors". To be a contributor you
> have to make at least one contribution. English Wikipedia had 151934
> such contributors at the end of October 2006.

That figure is the number of registered user accounts which had made 10 
or more contributions. So apart from being 14 months out of date, it 
ignores registered user accounts with fewer contributions, and, more 
importantly, completely ignores anonymous contributions. Dynamic and 
shared IP addresses make these very difficult to count, but what we do 
know is that it is they who account for most of the project's content.

-Gurch