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

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:27 AM, 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
> * 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

Some recycled stats for EN wikipedia from many months ago:

~ 215 k account creations / month (~15% imported from other wikis)
~ 65 k new accounts will edit at least once
~ 22 k new accounts will edit at least 5 times
~ 8 k new accounts will edit at least 10 times
~ 2.4 k new accounts will eventually edit at least 100 times.

There is a huge gap between the number of registrations and number of
new accounts that edit.  However, there is also a huge gap between the
number of people who edit at least once and the number that edit at
least 10 times.