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Prevalence of multiple Wikipedia account identities per real person

Determine how many different Wikipedia account identities a single real person may possess and use, particularly within a single editing episode, in order to validate the accuracy of the group-size measure N_e defined as the count of distinct usernames participating in an episode.

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Background

The paper measures episodic group size N_e as the number of distinct usernames participating in an editing episode. However, the mapping from real individuals to account identities (i.e., potential multi-account usage) is not directly observable in the logs.

The authors note that while this unknown may not affect their analysis provided users do not impersonate more than one individual within a single episode, the actual prevalence of multiple identities per person remains unresolved and could influence interpretations of group composition and dynamics.

References

It's unknown how many different identities real persons might have, but this will not affect the analysis as long as no user impersonates more than one individual during a particular editing episode.

— Causal evidence for social group sizes from Wikipedia editing data (2402.00595 - Burgess et al., 1 Feb 2024) in Section: Data collection and analysis (following the definition of N_e)