Evan Prodromou wrote:
So, I got interested a few days ago in the question of how many Wikitravel contributors start editing a page but bail out before completing their edit. I started combing the Apache logs for some answers.
wikitravel.org's robots.txt hides editing pages, but there are some non-compliant spiders that still follow edit links; some even mask their identity with a fake User-Agent header.
Still, I can say with some confidence that of non-spider hits on our edit pages, only about 25% result in a "submit" post afterwards. Although I think there are a lot of people who click "edit" without the idea of seriously contributing (the aforementioned spiders; people who are curious to see what will happen; people who hit edit by mistake), this still seems quite high.
I'm wondering if anyone has similar statistics for other Mediawiki sites, other wiki-engine sites, and specifically for Wikimedia sites. I'd like to get a comparison to see what we can do on Wikitravel to cut down on these bailouts and help people finish their contributions; a rough idea of what rate of bailing out other sites get would be helpful for that.
I suspect a lot of the hits on edit pages are due to readers following red links, rather than people clicking the edit tab. I'm not sure how many hits per second Wikimedia gets, but from the profiling data I can tell you that about 8% of our backend requests (i.e. squid cache misses) are edit form requests. About 16% of edit form requests result in a save attempt.
Here's an amusing story about this phenomenon: Jerome, on first seeing the huge number of edit requests in the logs, thought we were under a DoS attack from "many IPs", and made moves to start blocking them. Luckily we set him straight before he did any damage :)
-- Tim Starling