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Follow-up investigation of temporary accounts deployment on large wikis
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Description

This task is a follow-up to T395618: Investigate the overall effects of the Temp Accounts minor pilot deployment and T395134: [Request] Analyzing the roll-out of temp accounts on major pilots as it impacts anti-abuse work, for the temporary accounts rollout to large wikis.

This will include specifically enwiki, eswiki, commonswiki and wikidata, which were rolled out within a 2-week window in November 2025.

Event Timeline

With @nettrom_WMF's help, I re-ran the analysis conducted on major pilot wikis, on enwiki, eswiki, commonswiki and wikidatawiki.

Brief methodology:

  • We defined pre- and post-deployment time windows, both starting on the same day of the week:
    • Pre-deployment: 30 days up to 31 October
    • Post-deployment: 30 days starting from 13 Novemner
  • We compared these windows to each other in 2025
  • We compared these windows to the same dates in 2024 (and also 2023 and 2019)

Overall, and similarly to T395134#11116439, we found no significant changes in:

  • the rate of account registrations
  • the rate of edits, neither overall nor when looking at the Main and Talk namespaces in particular
  • the proportion of edits made by non-logged in users, again looking across all edits and Main & Talk specifically

For blocks, we similar results to the major pilots analysis.

Similarly to T395134#11116439, we found no significant changes in:

  • the overall number of blocks issued
  • the number of blocks issued to registered accounts

And similarly to T395134#11120266, we did see a significant decrease in the proportion of blocks that were IP blocks, after temporary accounts were deployed:

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