[Foundation-l] Increasing the number of new accounts who actually edit

[Andre Engels]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
<wikihannibal at 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

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com