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

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2010/9/22 Risker <risker.wp at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>

The other simple method is to compare statistics before and after SUL
was implemented. Comparision of old statistics from the current one
could also tell us if the proportion of non-editing accounts  vs
editing is stable over the time or not...

-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html