[Labs-l] User registration date on DB replicas

[Felipe Ortega]

Hello all.

I'm CCing the analytics list in case this question is also relevant for them. Not sure about research-l, so please forward this message if that's the case.

I have a question regarding the registration date for new user accounts (table user). The information is (apparently) public, as it can be retrieved from the Special:ListUsers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers&username=DarTar&group=&limit=50

Furthermore, Dario uploaded to DataHub a CSV file with an hourly series of registration dates in 2008-2011, from enwiki:
http://datahub.io/dataset/wikipedia-new-user-registrations

It would be quite interesting to study the whole series (say, back to 2004) and compare it with other languages. However, this info is not available on the DB replicas in Tool-Labs (whole column 'user_registration' in table 'user' is NULL).

My question is: are there any reasons for redacting this (apparently public) info? I can't figure out why this could be sensitive data.

Thanks in advance, best regards.
Felipe.
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