Wikistats has it that 5,644,681 registered accounts published at least once 
till Oct 1, 2015, and 2,181,006 three or more times.
It used to publish that on [1][2] but I just removed it. 

I'm campaigning against us publishing overly inflated counts since about two 
years (Wikimania London).

Since this thread is going on and on, I'll repost my (reworded) reservations on 
this particular metric, for newcomers.

Even if we state explicitly that this is not unique people, any audience will 
think it may be close and we are overly correct by adding the caveat. It may 
not be so close. For that reason imo such a metric would be of questionable 
value, to put it mildly.

Pine:
> Is there a way to get counts for the number of accounts, including or 
> excluding IPs, that have ever edited English Wikipedia, ? 

First the anon contributors: when we'd count every ip address that shows up in 
the dumps, we'd count *very* many people who were just vandalizing willfully, 
or just pressing edit for fun, or forgot to login once, and also moved from one 
ip address to another over the years. On top of that many people get a new ip 
address (from a pool) on every session, depends on provider policy. 

As for registered editors the number Wikistats used to publish may be a rather 
empty metric for several reasons:
- How many casual editors will have forgotten their password and just created a 
new user id? Only veteran editors know about sockpuppeting and how one is 
supposed not to do that.
- How many people will have registered in good faith just out of habit, or to 
tweak presentation preferences, and then played with the edit button just to 
see what happens? Note that roughly 2 out of 3 accounts doesn't even reach 3 
edits.

Cheers,
Erik Zachte

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution
[2] BTW I use the term wikipedians overly inclusive in that report. A person 
who edited once or twice isn't a wikipedian in my book, just like a person who 
writes two post-it notes per month and nothing else isn't called a writer. Some 
terms only apply above some threshold.

-----Original Message-----
From: Analytics [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Andrew Gray
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 11:06
To: A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who has an 
interest in Wikipedia and analytics.
Subject: Re: [Analytics] User statistics for video marking ENWP 5m article 
milestone

To a very crude approximation, there are approximately 8.2 million accounts 
which have at least one edit on English Wikipedia - at least assuming my SQL 
query is correct! http://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/1911

This is all user accounts with one or more edits in the contributions record; 
it does not contain IPs, and it does not contain any accounts whose sole 
contributions have since been deleted (which is probably quite a substantial 
number). Conversely, it includes a vast panoply of single-use vandalism 
accounts, sockpuppets, etc etc etc. And bots, of course.

Andrew.

On 27 October 2015 at 05:50, Pine W <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is there a way to get counts for the number of accounts, including or 
> excluding IPs, that have ever edited English Wikipedia, ? It would be 
> preferable to know the number of unique people, but of course that's 
> impossible.
>
> Thanks,
> Pine
>
> Aha, that is important for me to know. Thanks Andrew.
>
> Pine
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Andrew Gray 
> <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 11 September 2015 at 19:19, James Forrester 
>> <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >> Does it include editors on all Wikimedia projects
>> >
>> > No.
>> >
>> >> or just those who have registered and/or edited on ENWP?
>> >
>> > Registered, regardless of having edited.
>>
>> James is of course correct, but one small caveat worth adding: 
>> because of SUL, a substantial proportion of these will be "autocreated"
>> accounts from other projects - so even 'registration' may not mean 
>> what it seems.
>>
>> --
>> - Andrew Gray
>>   [email protected]
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Analytics mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Analytics mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics
>



--
- Andrew Gray
  [email protected]

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