On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 12:36 AM, Jan Ainali <jan.ainali@wikimedia.se> wrote:
Hello,

We had a thought here on the WMSE office. Today on svwp (and perhaps all other wikis?) if you create an article from a redlink you get into wikitext edit mode immediatly. How about doing an A/B test for new editors (or even IP-users) and assign &veaction=edit instead on redlinks for a sample and compare how many actually complete the article creation.

Or has this test already been made? If so, where can I find results?

I don't think we've run an A/B test like that, and definitely not on svwiki. It's definitely a good idea, since users starting articles with VE will definitely run in to different challenges than those editing existing articles. James and the VE team are no doubt pretty busy, but overall running this kind of experiment is not too hard. 

We're probably going to run quite a few tests along these lines once we get started up on article creation improvements on the Growth team,[1] including whether and how to present drafts as an option to new editors.

1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_creation
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Draft_namespace 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager