Am 10/19/2012 05:28 PM, schrieb Rob Weir:
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?
Yes, maybe a good chance to tell others some numbers from our project.
However, the wording of the number is (for some people) the more
important part. So, this should be double-checked.
That means it doesn't make sense to say "hey, we have 58,000+
contributors" but more like "... in the last 12 months we got
contributions from ~3,000 active people (incl. accounts from SVN, BZ,
Wiki, MLs, etc.).
Marcus
