Thank you both for you replies, Andreea and Ziko.
I am wondering if this initial period of anonymity affects long-term participation positively or not. My first guess would be that those users who register after a period of anonymous contribution are more likely to stay in the community for long periods of time, because during that time they had the chance to acclimatize to the community.
Has anybody ever looked into this question?
cheers
G
On 17/05/2011 20:40, Gorbatai, Andreea wrote:
Dear Giovanni -
As far as I know from formal and informal interviews with Wikipedia contributors, many people (I don't know the percentage) edit initially without creating an account, and/or they are not very strict about logging in when they edit initially (where "initially" can be first 5 edits or first 50, within the same month or spaced over a couple of years, I don't know for sure).
As people become more involved in editing and more concerned with earning a reputation, or with being able to retrieve their own edits (and generally understand the benefits of using their user accounts), they become more aware of the importance of being logged in. However there still remain instances where people deliberately choose not to be logged in, such as when they are editing an article (or make an edit) they don't want to tracked back to their account. An example of this that I encountered would be copyediting articles that deal with x-rated movies /movie stars (self-reported by interviewees).