On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wikihannibal@gmail.com wrote:
Did you know that less than a third of the users who create an account on English Wikipedia make even *one* edit afterwards? Two-thirds of all new accounts never edit! Interestingly, this percentage vary very much from language version to language version.
Now, the question is not: "what can we do about it?" We know plenty of things that we *could* do. The question is this: "what are the easiest levers to push that increase the numbers?"
I think we need to take a step back first. Before deciding on what to do about this, two other questions have to be asked:
1. Why are people creating an account without editing? 2. Do we want/need to do something about it?
There are various reasons why people could register without editing. To name a few: * people coming in from other Wikimedia wikis, auto-registering through SUL * people creating sock puppets, then not needing them or forgetting them when they do need them or having them blocked before they have the chance to use them * people wanting to change personal settings * people thinking they can get something extra by registering (previous category, but then for personal settings that don't exist) * people who out of a habit register for every web site they see where they can * people who find they cannot create an article on en: wikipedia unregistered, want to create an article, register and then find creating an article is too difficult
Not all of these categories we want to do something about their non-editing, and when we do want to do something about it, we should not use the same strategy on all. Therefore, before trying to solve the problem, I think you should first determine 1. whether there is a problem, and 2. if so, what the problem is