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

[Risker]

On 22 September 2010 04:27, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>

I think Andre is right, and this is the reason for so many non-editing
accounts, especially since SUL.  I am sure someone can run a script to
determine how many "non-editing" English WP accounts have a partner
"editing" account on another project.

Risker/Anne