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.

Thanks,

~Evan