[EE] Asking anonymous editors to join the community

Hey all, Sorry to see that this mailing list has been more quiet of late! I thought I'd give an update on the work of the Growth team recently. The last month or so, we've been hard at work on our next project, which we call anonymous editor acquisition.[1] We'd like to grow the community of registered Wikipedians, but showing readers banners and other calls to join the community are extremely noisy and not very effective. So who should we ask to join and become a Wikipedian? Well, there is actually a very large group of casual contributors on the site now who we pay very little attention to, and that's anonymous (or IP) editors. Other than the "create account" link, there's actually only one message that invites these people to join. That's the mid-edit message you see which warns you that your IP address will become public, and which makes you abandon your edit if you want to go sign up. We think that we can make friendlier and more helpful versions of this, in addition other ways to entice people to register accounts and join the community. Aaron Halfaker has done some great work digging in to the volume of edits and impact of anonymous editing today.[2] This helped confirm that anonymous editors are a group of users who know relatively little about, but who are a large group of potentially high-value contributors. We've also cooked up a pretty extensive list of features to try. The first A/B test we're running is one where we simply try asking IP editors to sign up.[3] We're launching this test next week in English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias.[4] 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition 2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Volum… 3. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites 4. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signu… -- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/