Thank you both for you replies, Andreea and Ziko.
I am wondering if this initial period of anonymity affects long-term
participation positively or not. My first guess would be that those
users who register after a period of anonymous contribution are more
likely to stay in the community for long periods of time, because during
that time they had the chance to acclimatize to the community.
Has anybody ever looked into this question?
cheers
G
On 17/05/2011 20:40, Gorbatai, Andreea wrote:
Dear Giovanni -
As far as I know from formal and informal interviews with Wikipedia
contributors, many people (I don't know the percentage) edit
initially without creating an account, and/or they are not very
strict about logging in when they edit initially (where "initially"
can be first 5 edits or first 50, within the same month or spaced
over a couple of years, I don't know for sure).
As people become more involved in editing and more concerned with
earning a reputation, or with being able to retrieve their own edits
(and generally understand the benefits of using their user accounts),
they become more aware of the importance of being logged in. However
there still remain instances where people deliberately choose not to
be logged in, such as when they are editing an article (or make an
edit) they don't want to tracked back to their account. An example of
this that I encountered would be copyediting articles that deal with
x-rated movies /movie stars (self-reported by interviewees).
--
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
Ph.D. Candidate
Faculty of Informatics
University of Lugano
Web:
http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/ciampaglia/
Bertastraße 36 ∙ 8003 Zürich ∙ Switzerland