[WikiEN-l] Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)

[Kat Walsh]

On 6/19/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > ... the *940* admins, and a million registered users, and who knows how
> > many anonymous contributors. And that's just for the English Wikipedia!
> > What about on de:, fr:, ja: and the rest?
>
> See why I think we should prune all the dead registered users? Only a
> fraction of those claimed "million registered users" have ever even
> logged in and made a couple of useful edits. A tiny fraction are still
> logging in and making useful edits.

The last numbers I saw had roughly 2/3 of registered accounts on en:
having no non-deleted edits; some might have created pages that later
got deleted. (Note: user creation jumped after the restrictions on
anon users creating articles were put in place.)

However, I don't think we can prune dead accounts until after single
user login is implemented... some "dead" usernames were registered by
people from other languages to prevent impersonation. Even then, many
people have accounts solely for reading, in order to set user
preferences, or to avoid getting a constant stream of "new messages"
from vandalism warnings for shared IPs -- and we encourage them to do
this.

-Kat

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