Lars Aronsson wrote:
Platonides wrote:
And many don't even perform one edit. As I don't believe so many people create them just to change their preferences, it is a mistery for me why do they do so.
Becoming an active wikipedian is a process in many steps, each involving a large amount of hesitation. Does this article really need improvement? Can I fix it? Should I fix it? Do I know how to edit? Do I have the time right now? Should I register? After having improved the text, should I really press save, or should I just quit and forget about it?
Maybe we have a million readers, and only 10% think the article needs improvement, only 10% of them think they could fix it, etc. We are losing people in every step of hesitation from reader to active contributor. It is really irrelevant in which step we lose them. We may have a million readers and we get a hundred contributors. These might be 100 out of 1,000 registered users or 100 out of 10,000 who thought about registering, or 100 out of 5,000 who went half-way through registration. The constant is 100 and the other number is quite arbitrary. Any statistic based on that arbitrary number is bound to be bad math.
There's good math to be had for the digging.
Can you envision a leaky pipeline starting with the mass of readers' first visits to WP and the terminus at long-term editors. Something along the lines of https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimato... seems appropriate, maybe someone can pick a more optimistic analogy. At each new obstacle the cohort shrinks. If it was possible to interest someone with statistical training to assemble actual data, I imagine it would be useful and entertaining. It might have to be collected prospectively. Would wiki-research-l be a better forum for this?