Wouldn't someone leaving & returning as a new username be a loss of 1 and a gain of 1? Thereby being a net change of zero?
I'm sure there is some username churn in the stats, but I'd be surprised if it was a significant portion (more than 1%) of tens of thousands of users. -Jon On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 17:27, Sarah <slimvir...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Ting, > > One of the things I wondered about the editor trends study is whether > it focused only on user names, as opposed to people. > > It says: "Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble > successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the > English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a > year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new > editors were still active a year after their first edit." > > A simple explanation is that a significant percentage of new accounts > after 2007 were not new people, but people returning with new > identities, sometimes multiple ones. Any regular editor will tell you > that this happens a lot, for various reasons. Accounts are banned; > privacy is compromised; people acquire a certain reputation with an > account and want to start over; or they want a break from being User > X, for whatever reason, and become User Y for a while. > > Did the study do anything to correlate number of accounts with number of > people? > > Sarah > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- Jon [[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ http://snowulf.com/ http://ipv6wiki.net/ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l