On Jul 17, 2014, at 6:33 PM, Howie Fung <hfung@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thanks for putting this together -- this is really interesting data.  It's interesting that the 5+ activation rate for mobile web > desktop now -- just a few months ago, mobile was about half of desktop.

Yeah, the jump happened in May, and we still don't know why. My theory is lastmodified, but it's a bit of a stretch for 5+.


It could be the case that mobile web editors make a smaller number of small edits/spread a big edit out into smaller ones -- would be interesting at some point to see whether these initial edits happen in rapid succession.  

I can play around with some visualizations for that :)

It'll also be interesting to compare the (short-term) retention rates of mobile vs. desktop.

The Activation rate for apps is weird.  We know on desktop that about 70% of users create an account, but never edit -- this would imply that on mobile apps a far higher percentage of users create accounts for reasons unrelated to editing.  We should look a little closer to the data .  Something doesn't seem right.

If it's weird, it's at least consistently weird -- I saw the same thing (a ~1% 1+ conversion rate) in the early post-release data. This is coming from Wikimetrics, which is pretty reliable. But yeah, let's get an independent third party to verify...

In the meantime, some wild speculation: maybe people really are used to signing up on all apps as part of first time ux without necessarily getting anything out of it, more so than on other platforms.


Howie



On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Maryana Pinchuk <mpinchuk@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Greetings all, and happy 1 month anniversary of the tablet redirect :)

I've got some data to share on new tablet, phone, and app editors and how they stack up against new desktop editors. This is enwiki only for now; I await the glorious return of Dario to help us out with global data :)

New active mobile editors

Our metric for new active mobile editors is 5+ edits within 30 days of registration, so we don't quite have the full numbers on the first month of newly registered users yet (because people who signed up yesterday haven't had time to reach active status). But here's today's snapshot of the percent of newly registered users we've converted to active editors in the last 30 days across all out different platforms:

<image (21).png>
Note that the trend Dario observed still holds – both newly registered tablet and mobile site users are being converted to 5+ editors at a higher rate than desktop. 

Slightly concerning is the conversion rate on the Android app – I'd have expected this to be higher, more in line with mobile site editors on phones. We'll need to figure out if this is due to users editing anonymously on the app instead of signing in and counting toward our new active user count.

New user productivity

I was also interested in the volume of contribution we're seeing across each of the platforms, to get a sense of how much new folks are contributing. So I ran the numbers for bytes changed (added, removed, and total changed) by newly registered users across all our different platforms:

<image (20).png>
Though mobile site editors (both tablet and phone) are reaching 5+ edits at a higher rate than desktop users, it looks like desktop editors make significantly bigger edits in terms of bytes. Not super surprising, given the smaller screen real-estate and greater difficulty in contributing longform text, but it's good to validate that with real data. Note again that Android app editors are on the lower end of bytes contributed.

To me, these two graphs raise the question of whether mobile site editors (on both tablets & phones) make a larger number of small edits as opposed to one big edit like they might on desktop. I don't know if we'll be able to answer that definitively anytime soon, but it's definitely something to think about and dig into more in the future...

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Maryana Pinchuk
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org



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Howie Fung
Director of Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation

hfung@wikimedia.org