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

[Alex]

On 9/22/2010 3:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 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?"
> 
> We have a couple of ideas (they are presented on the Outreach wiki, at
> http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project),
> but we need your help! Here are three easy things that you can do:
> 
> 1. Offer ideas
> 2. Sign up to help with the project
> 3. Spread the word. Do you know anybody who would want to be interested in
> helping out? Pass this message on.
> 

Personally, I think you're starting too far back on the issue. We have
plenty of people who create accounts, edit, then stop almost
immediately. Among people who do make an edit, the enwiki retention rate
a few months later is 1-2%. I think we should try to improve that first.
One concern on the English Wikipedia is the rather impersonal way that
new users are handled - everything is bots and template messages. Simply
increasing the volume of new accounts will only exacerbate that problem.

Just very recently, for a completely unrelated discussion, I complied
some statistics for the English Wikipedia (though it could be run for
any project) about users' first edits and editor retention. The full
results are at [1], the summary is:

* Users who create an article are much more likely to leave the project
if their article is deleted. 1 in ~160 will stay if their article is
deleted while 1 in ~22 will stay otherwise
* Our main source of regular users is not users who start by creating an
article.
    * Users who start by editing an existing page outnumber article
creators by 3:1
    * Users who start by editing an existing article are far less likely
to have their first edits deleted (and therefore are far more likely to
stay)
    * From the users analyzed, we got fewer than 200 regular users from
those who created articles (1.3% retention), we got more than 900 from
users who edited existing pages (2.5% retention)
* A significant number of regular users (24%) get their start outside of
mainspace.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mr.Z-man/newusers

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)