Piotr Konieczny wrote: > Getting any reliable estimates on our community has always been > difficult. However, recently, in official Wikimedia Foundation > announcements and such (ex. > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Letter/en?utm_source=2008_jimmy_letter_r&utm_medium=sitenotice&utm_campaign=fundraiser2008#appeal) > > the number "a global community of more than 150,000 volunteers" > appeared. I would very much like to now - what date is it based on? > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians gives 8.5 million > registered accounts. Of course many of those are duplicates, but then > there are many unregistered contributors... still, my own guesstimate > would be at at least half a million - if not several millions - of > people who had edited Wikipedia (in any language, ove the past ~8 > years).
No doubt, millions of people have edited some version of Wikipedia, with constructive intent. This guesstimate is based on analysis of a small sample of > editors I know and how many accounts they've created (which for a vast > majority is ONE). Sure, there are sockpuppet vandals, but... do we > really have 150,000 volunteers, maybe as much legitimate socks/bots, and > over 8 millions vandal sockpuppet accounts??? I'm not at all clear how you arrived at the figure "8 millions vandal sockpuppet accounts", nor what you mean by it. However, it doesn't follow from the figures you've cited. Rather, I believe most of the 8.5 million user accounts are simply inactive. Someone made an edit, constructive or not, then left, and did not return with that account (at least not yet). Matt Flaschen _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
