OpenStreetMap
I spent some time today producing some numbers to show how large the effect of old accounts returning and starting to edit actually is and determined the annual numbers of new mappers that created their account at least two years back. For 2014 this would be accounts created in 2011 and earlier.
Year New mappers
with old accounts
2012 1'817
2013 2'241
2014 2'848
To give some perspective: 2014 missing maps and HOT together attracted roughly 1’500 new mappers. The total number of new contributors in 2014 was 105’612..
Thanks to TomH for providing some of the data required for the stats.
Discussion
Comment from Vincent de Phily on 7 May 2015 at 13:14
It’s higher than I expected :) Not sure if we can use that to improve OSM’s conversion rate, but at least it quantifies how bad the idea of purging inactive accounts is. Thanks for these stats.
Comment from SimonPoole on 7 May 2015 at 13:46
@Vincent well I’m not convinced our conversion rate -needs- improving. It would naturally be nice.
I should point out that the end of 2011 we had roughly half a million accounts (500’000) so the 2’848 is actually 0.5% of that, even more if you deduct the already active mappers from the 500k. So we should expect this number to coninue to increase in absolute terms.
Comment from pnorman on 18 May 2015 at 21:55
Having looked at other projects, our conversion and retention rates are reasonable. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to improve it, after all, many of the accounts belong to people who have shown some interest in OSM, but it’s a fact of life that people sign up for online accounts then disappear.