joe134cd:
In any case you have anecdotally confirmed that WT is accurate with its counting methods.
It seems that the collation of the reports is accurate at a higher level, but the information reported by individual members is likely more prone to error. This was even more the case when members had to report preaching hours and were incentivised to inflate the figures.
Wt under reports it membership, by not including kids.
This is intentional (and it isn’t simply ‘underestimating’ at all). There is a trade-off in that it suggests lower membership than is actually the case by other metrics but the upside (from their perspective) is that it 1) inflates the supposed rate of growth and 2) misrepresents the amount of interest of non-members by comparison with ‘Bible studies’ and Memorial attendance.