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

[Brian J Mingus]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Lennart Guldbrandsson
<wikihannibal at gmail.com> 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.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Lennart
>
> --
> Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia Sverige and press contact for
> Swedish Wikipedia // ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för
> svenskspråkiga Wikipedia
> _______________________________________________

Some of the people who create accounts probably realize that they
don't actually have a valuable contribution to make, and so move on.
Some are just lazy. Some came for other reasons mentioned elsewhere in
this thread.

If you want to encourage these people to actually come up with a
valuable contribution you'll have to incentivize that for them. While
it may be hard for a wikipediholic to understand the lack of incentive
structure for newcomers, many newcomers simply may not understand the
value of their potential contribution, and so it doesn't put them over
the contribution threshold.

One way to bring the reward structure of contributing to Wikipedia to
their attention would be to explain it to them after they create their
account. I'll leave it to the wikipediholics to explain best how to do
that =)

- Brian