[Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>:
>> I believe there are around 600,000 qualified accounts (roughly half of
>> which from enwiki).
>
> What is your source for that?
>
>> PS. Incidentally enwiki has 9.7 M registered accounts, but 70% of
>> these have exactly 0 edits and 90% have less than 5 edits.
>
> 90% with less than 5 edits means about 1 million with more. I would
> imagine a sizeable proportion of people with 5 edits have 25. 300,000
> eligible enwiki accounts seems small to me. There are (as Sue rightly
> says) half that many active accounts, and I doubt half of all
> Wikipedians are still around (back when we had exponential growth of
> users that might have been the case, but we levelled out a while
> back).

As of last September, exactly 297467 enwiki accounts had made 20 or
more edits.  [1]

The distribution is compellingly log-log, which implies about 255,000
accounts on enwiki with 25+ edits on that date.  Extrapolating the
rate of increase forward 6 months gets you to about 300,000.  Other
analysis generally indicates that scaling enwiki results to the global
wiki community generally requires a factor of a little more than 2.
(Taking Sue's number at face value, which strikes me as a little high,
would imply a factor closer to 3.)  Doubling 300,000 is 600,000.
Maybe that needs to be higher, e.g. 750,000 or something, but I'm
fairly confident it is in the right ballpark.  Also, there is a good
deal of overcounting with individuals having accounts on multiple
wikis.

Incidentally, Tim Starling actually generated a list of qualified
accounts during the setup process.  Assuming he still has it lying
around, we could possibly get an exact count.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_frequency/All_registered