On 6/19/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@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