I recently saw another open source project claim that they had over 3000 contributors. They derived this estimate by looking at the number of user accounts they had in their wiki.
That is quite clever, I thought. Since we use the same wiki software, I thought I'd check this metric for us. Our wiki says we have over 58,000 user accounts. I know we're doing well, but would it really make sense to claim that we have over 58,000 contributors? I don't think so. I suppose we could look only at accounts where the person has actually contributed edits, or even recent edits. (MediaWiki is a well-known target of registration spam). Although the other project did not seem to filter out inactive or unused accounts, I think the metrics are meaningless unless we do that. What do you think? Or do we even care? -Rob
