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). Hope this helps. Best- Andreea Gorbatai -----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ziko van Dijk Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 1:30 PM To: ciampagg(a)usi.ch; Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Anonymous users 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(a)usi.ch>ch>: -- Ziko van Dijk The Netherlands http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l