Hi guys
What motivates people to do their first edit is a good question. On French
Wikipedia, we tried something which can help to answer the question.
When a new user creates an account, we suggest him to explain his
motivation. (The following statistics are empirical.)
* Half of them don't explain it, leave blank.
* Quarter create an account to read Wikipedia. This is a Facebook effect :
if you want to use the service, you must have an account. (Since that, we
have changed the create an account form in order to inform new users.)
* The last quarter give us information about their motivation to edit :
- create an article about their company (a lot)
- share knowledge about a precise domain :-)
- meet people (!)
- make vandalism (yes, they confessed it)
All of this has been collected by various volunteers, without a global
overview. It may not been realistic, but I think it give us a good idea of
the new users motivation. Unfortunately, we do not have time to make
realistic statistics about the newbies' motivation.
We changed small things about the patrol on new users edits :
* redirect the motivated ones to the specific help or wikiproject pages
* watch the vandals more carefully, or talk to them before they make
nonsense edits
* redirect the "business guys" to the admission criteria page
* improve the welcome message to give tips to the readers, and teach them
they can contribute too
* change the sandbox settings in order to explain how to create an article
Hope this helps.
Benoît
Le 6 avr. 2013 18:09, "Jacob Orlowitz" <jorlowitz(a)gmail.com> a écrit :
Also,
I love this post on why people (women especially) don't edit:
http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia…
And this post on the motivations of active editors, well-compiled by
Steven and Maryana:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWikimaniaMotivationsT…
Do we have any good data on what motivates people to make their *first*
edit?
Jake
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