Dear colleague,
Maybe I don't totally unterstand what you are surprised about. :-) It happens a lot that people edit Wikipedia without being logged-in, indeed.
I don't know how to find out how many people first edit unregistered and later register, but I believe that it is quite common. This is btw not very good because editing without registration has a lot of negative side effects.
I wouldn't speak about "anonymous users" because that sounds as if you are no longer anonymous after registration. Many people believe that registration means that they have to reveal their identity and so they don't register.
Some statistics: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#anonymous
Kind regards Ziko van Dijk
2011/5/17 Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia ciampagg@usi.ch:
Hello list, Some time ago I was reading a blog created by a group of editors of the Italian Wikipedia for the 10 years birthday of Wikipedia. [1] There was an interesting series of posts written by some prominent members of the community recalling their first experience with Wikipedia. What struck me from these accounts is that several of them wrote they had spent some time contributing anonymously before registering a user account.
I was wondering if there are any figures on how systematic the phenomenon might be. Has anybody ever looked into this kind of questions (not necessarily in the context of Wikipedia)?
Pointers to the literature would be very much appreciated :-)
Cheers,
-- Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
Ph.D. Candidate Faculty of Informatics University of Lugano Web: http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/ciampaglia/
Bertastraße 36 * 8003 Zürich * Switzerland
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