Platonides wrote:
And many don't even perform one edit. As I
don't believe so many people
create them just to change their preferences, it is a mistery for me why
do they do so.
Becoming an active wikipedian is a process in many
steps, each involving a large amount of hesitation.
Does this article really need improvement? Can I
fix it? Should I fix it? Do I know how to edit? Do I
have the time right now? Should I register? After
having improved the text, should I really press
save, or should I just quit and forget about it?
Maybe we have a million readers, and only 10% think
the article needs improvement, only 10% of them
think they could fix it, etc. We are losing people
in every step of hesitation from reader to active
contributor. It is really irrelevant in which step
we lose them. We may have a million readers and
we get a hundred contributors. These might be
100 out of 1,000 registered users or 100 out of
10,000 who thought about registering, or 100 out
of 5,000 who went half-way through registration.
The constant is 100 and the other number is
quite arbitrary. Any statistic based on that
arbitrary number is bound to be bad math.
There's good math to be had for the digging.
Can you envision a leaky pipeline starting with the mass of
readers' first visits to WP and the terminus at long-term
editors. Something along the lines of
seems appropriate, maybe someone can pick a more optimistic
analogy. At each new obstacle the cohort shrinks. If it was
possible to interest someone with statistical training to
assemble actual data, I imagine it would be useful and
entertaining. It might have to be collected prospectively.
Would wiki-research-l be a better forum for this?
--
Charles Polisher