[Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/21 Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>:
>> 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>:
>>
>>>> I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me!
>>>> Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope
>>>> there will be a board resolution soon.
>>>
>>> As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019
>>> votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable.
>>
>> Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote?
>> 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the
>> editing community really is!
>
> Millions, presumably. The English Wikipedia has nearly 10 million
> registered users, although a large portion of those won't have 25
> edits (and some will be sockpuppets). Once you take the whole
> Wikimedia movement into account, the number of eligible voters must
> surely be over a million. A very large portion of those will no longer
> be involved in the projects, though.

I believe there are around 600,000 qualified accounts (roughly half of
which from enwiki).  If you choose a historically active account at
random, there is somewhat less than a 10% chance that any given
account will edit in any given month.  Which suggests that the pool of
people who are qualified and likely to have seen the site notice is
around 60,000.  If that number is in the right ballpark, then actual
participation from qualified people who saw the announcement was
perhaps 20-30%.

-Robert Rohde

PS. Incidentally enwiki has 9.7 M registered accounts, but 70% of
these have exactly 0 edits and 90% have less than 5 edits.