[Foundation-l] spamming of the english wikipedia users detected

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/3/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > On 7/3/07, Matthew Britton <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
> >> You didn't even manage to email the right set of users.
>
> A question Greg...
>
> Did you contact ALL eligeable participants on the english wikipedia, or
> only a subset of them ?


A subset, but you will not object to its nature.

I started with a list of nearly 20,000 eligible enwiki users who have
made at least one edit since March 1st. (this is the subset, I did not
mail long inactive users).

I had the computer randomize the order of the list.

I removed all that have voted (no matter which project they voted from).

I also looked at all the accounts with "Bot" in their name, and
removed just those that actually appeared to be bots.

I've emailed about half. ... it is very slow going. I continually
remove anyone who votes, so they should not be emailed.