Hi everyone,
Last week the Editor Engagement Experiments team deployed a new extension
to all wikis, Extension:Campaigns (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Campaigns).
The campaigns extension does one thing: if you add "campaign=example" to a
link pointing at the account creation form, it logs the campaign name at
the time of signup.
This capability has been around a long time in some form or another, but we
disabled it so we could get to work on our redesign of account creation and
login. Now that's it's finished, we wanted to make it available again.
There's more in the documentation I linked to above, but the general point
is that this gives us a low cost, minimally invasive way to figure out how
many people are coming to sign up via a particular avenue.
Among our first test cases, my team would really like to know if
significant numbers of people are signing up via the links English
Wikipedia puts in system messages directed at those viewing semi-protected
pages and anonymous editors. I've put up a proposal about this on-wiki at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Let.27s_fi…
If you have any questions about how campaigns work and how they might be
applied elsewhere, please speak up. :)
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/