[Foundation-l] Message to community about community decline

[Sarah]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 21:20, Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am really not sure how many of them are clean starts and socks. Probably
> not a lot, but I also doubt that the number is insignificant. Given privacy
> policies and people deliberately covering their tracks when using a new
> identity, we probably can only guess at real numbers.
>
> Hazarding a guess I would therorize the "returning" editor population to be
> around 5-10% at any given time, at most.
>
> Editors have a certain attachment to their identity so starting over isn't
> exactly a choice taken lightly - its something done because events connected
> with an old name make it more difficult to continue editing under it than it
> is to break the attachment to ones identity.

I agree with you about attachment, but lots of editors have more than
one account, so that issue needn't arise. A new account arriving in
2007 and leaving six months later might just as easily be an
established user having set up a new account, then abandoning it, and
returning to her old one. Or continuing to use the old one throughout.
There are lots of possible combinations here.

We had the same problem trying to guess the number of women at around
13 per cent. It was unscientific, but it did at least (sort of) fit
people's experiences.

But this editors' survey leaves the number of actual people we're
dealing with completely up in the air. We really shouldn't be saying
it's the most important issue we face based on that survey alone.

Sarah