[Wiki-dev] removal of unused accounts?

[Tim Bird]

Bill Traynor wrote:
> 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?

I'd be inclined to send out a notice to all users that we:
1) appreciate their support of the elinux wiki, and that
2) as part of routine maintenance, we delete accounts older
than 1 year that have seen no activity
3) we encourage everyone to add something, even if miniscule
to the wiki (can be their user page, a comment on a talk page,
adding a link to an existing topic, etc.) at least once a year.

Then I'd snapshot the list, and save it for a year.
Next year (2011) at this time, snapshot the list again, and any account
that was on the 2010 list that has had no activity, remove.
 -- Tim

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Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
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