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