[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Jon Davis]

Wouldn't someone leaving & returning as a new username be a loss of 1 and a
gain of 1? Thereby being a net change of zero?

I'm sure there is some username churn in the stats, but I'd be surprised if
it was a significant portion (more than 1%) of tens of thousands of users.

-Jon

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 17:27, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ting,
>
> One of the things I wondered about the editor trends study is whether
> it focused only on user names, as opposed to people.
>
> It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble
> successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the
> English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a
> year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new
> editors were still active a year after their first edit."
>
> A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts
> after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new
> identities, sometimes multiple ones. Any regular editor will tell you
> that this happens a lot, for various reasons. Accounts are banned;
> privacy is compromised; people acquire a certain reputation with an
> account and want to start over; or they want a break from being User
> X, for whatever reason, and become User Y for a while.
>
> Did the study do anything to correlate number of accounts with number of
> people?
>
> Sarah
>
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-- 
Jon
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