Anyone have any idea what this is all about? Appears to be these people behind it (see User:Commprac01 (T-C-L-K-R-D) and Special:Contributions/Commprac01), but presumably it's been commissioned by someone.

Well it looks like a survey, Eva. Nothing special or interesting about that, as far as I can see. Regardless, why has the account not been blocked for being a spam-only account?

Guessed that – but who would have commissioned a survey on the best ways to graphically represent a user's edit count? It's not something I could imagine the most obsessive wikipedo – let alone external academics or a corporate sponsor – taking much of an interest in.

Ah, gotcha. Well, I agree it is a bit strange. There is of course more to Wikipedia than edit counts - and glorifying them in the form of graphs is even stranger, because most people, including most editors, don't care in the slightest. Each to their own of course.

When I noticed this last night, I asked them how many editors they planned to distribute it to... I worry that because it's an online thing ( I haven't looked at their material ) it might be very many...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Com...ese_requests.3F

Not sure what the right venue for them to seek consensus to continue distributing those, but I would wager the consensus would be "please don't".

Apparently they spoke to some admins at one point before sending out the initial blast to invite Seattle-based editors to the in-person focus group.