On Sunday, April 7, 2013, Benoît Evellin wrote:

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.

I conducted a short term post-registration survey on this topic on English Wikipedia which got a fairly significant number of responses.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Post-registration_editor_survey

There are also questions about this in the Annual Survey each year, IIRC.

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@gmail.com<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'jorlowitz@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%3AWikimaniaMotivationsTa...

Do we have any good data on what motivates people to make their *first* edit?

Jake

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