[Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: note to the militia

[Daniel Mayer]

On Saturday 24 August 2002 12:01 pm, Karen wrote:
> Something I wondered - how do you know who the new users to greet them?
> Do you just look for user names you haven't seen before or is there some
> way to identify them? I'd be happy to do the meet-and-greet but I don't
> know how to do it.

Well - I guess I do it the hard way and scan each edit in all Recent Changes 
for a 24 hour period looking for edit link user names (a dead give-a-away) 
and for user names I don't remember seeing before. This works for me since I 
pretty good reading comprehension and memory.

What would be most useful is a listing of new users that can be accessed from 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Listusers. That way this job would be 
much easier. 

BTW we really /do not/ have 3498 real users -- a good many of these "users" 
logged in only to abuse our upload utility or for other nefarious or 
non-contributing reasons (I don't greet any user who hasn't contributed at 
all). Is there a way to get rid of many of these no-longer used user accounts 
Lee (just the ones that have been inactive for months and whose user pages 
are still edit links)? 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)