Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Friday 04 November 2005 01:37, Tim Starling wrote:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
I guess there's not an easy way to find out how many people are bailing out of edits that they really want to make... except maybe to ask them. Perhaps a pop-up poll for folks who navigate away from an edit page in some way besides saving? Kind of intrusive but it might have interesting results.
You could tell the difference between red link clicks and edit tab clicks by checking the referrer, or by adding an extra parameter to the URL.
Even simpler solution: if the article existed when the URL was accessed it is certainly an edit, otherwise it's not (might have been attempt of creation of a new article, but we can't know that anyway).
You can't tell that from apache logs. Checking the referrer can be done solely with the apache logs, changing the URL is a one-line change to MediaWiki. Checking whether a title exists in the database is more complicated, especially if you want to do it efficiently.
-- Tim Starling