[arch-general] Drop in the number of ArchWiki registered users

[Dario Giovannetti]

On 01/02/14 13:13, Daniel Micay wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 12:06 AM, Dario Giovannetti <dariogiova at gmail.com  <https://mailman.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch-general>> wrote:
> >/  I keep track of some ArchWiki statistics in [1] and I've just realized that
> />/  in the last month we've had a 6000+ drop in the number of registered users,
> />/  which is a number that should instead only increase, as we don't have tools
> />/  for (mass) deleting accounts. Anybody knows what happened?
> />/  In the month of January, 3 commits have been made to [2], two of which are
> />/  updates to MediaWiki: maybe one of them caused the issue?
> />/
> />/  [1]
> />/  https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Maintenance_Team#Statistics
> />/  [2]https://projects.archlinux.org/vhosts/wiki.archlinux.org.git/
> />/
> />/  --
> />/  Dario (Kynikos)
> /
> Strange... do you know if any of these accounts belong to someone who
> has made contributions? I haven't seen anyone report that they were
> having issues logging in yet...
I have no idea whether those accounts had some particular properties, 
like having 0 contributions and being older than a particular date... 
I've checked in the upstream changelogs and haven't found anything 
related. In any case it would be really weird if it was a systematic 
account clean-up from upstream.
What is sure is that [3] now lists only the new number of users (~14800, 
before we had ~21000), and among them there are still users with 0 
contributions, e.g. [4]. The total number of edits hasn't dropped, so no 
revisions should have been lost.
Maybe it would be worth it if whoever has access to the ArchWiki 
database backups compared the recent ones with the current database.

[3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers
[4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Special:Contributions/00001000