[Wiki-dev] removal of unused accounts?

[Bill Traynor]

I've always been curious how many active or real users we have on 
elinux.org.  Today I ran a maintenance script called 
removedUnusedAccounts.php (it's in the maintenance dir of mediawiki 
installations) with no options and found the following:

There are 1275 Users that meet the cirteria of the script, that is "An 
unused account is one which has no edits, no deleted edits, no log 
entries and no current/old uploads." according to the script documentation.

The User Table row count equals 2135 giving us an active user base of 
860.  Does anyone think it's worth pinging the user base encouraging 
them to make an edit, at the very least to their User page?  Or, is it 
wise to simply run the script again with the -delete option and purge 
those users?

I can't imagine that all 1275 of these inactive users are truly 
inactive.  Perhaps they just need a nudge.

Thoughts?

Thanks
Bill