Back in May I announced that we were starting a new project to try and ask more anonymous editors to join the community and register accounts.[1] Since then, we've finished up our first A/B test on English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias. Yesterday we also launched our second A/B test, this time just in English.[2]  

As a refresher, the first time we tested two different workflows. In the first, called "pre-edit", we prompted people to sign up right after they clicked edit. In the second, called "post-edit", we told people about the advantages of signing up after they completed an edit as an IP. 

To summarize the test results: 

- The post-edit version was seen by much fewer people, and only gained us a incremental number of newly-registered Wikipedians. The plus side is that, because it didn't interrupt people, it caused no negative impact on the volume of edits by IPs. The few editors we gained were more likely to reach 5+ edits than users in a control group too. 

- The pre-edit version was much more interesting. It caused a very large increase in new registrations: +200% in English and German, +300% in French and Italian. These users who registered were also significantly more likely to complete a first edit. Unfortunately, this version also decreased the total volume of edits by IPs by ~25%. We have several theories about why this was, and the A/B test we just launched is an iteration on this pre-edit design to rule out some of those theories. 

You can check out our full research report so far at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_CTA_experiment. 

1. Original announcement https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/05/16/anonymous-editor-acquisition/

2. Specification https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anonymous_editor_acquisition/Signup_invites_v2

--