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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 21:18:40 +0200
From: "Marcus (OOo)" <marcus.mail@wtnet.de>
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To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Estimating contributors by looking at wiki accounts?
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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