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(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
>
> _______________________________________________
> EE mailing list
> EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org <javascript:_e({}, 'cvml',
> 'EE(a)lists.wikimedia.org');>
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
>
>
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/