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

[David Goodman]

Based on patrolling thousands of speedies and prod deletions at enWP,
of the people whose articles get rejected at enWP, I would say that
fewer  than 20% of them have even the least likelihood of becoming
helpful regular editors.  (and I've the reputation of taking an
extremely broad view of what might be conceivably be a potentially
useful article),

So the actual conversion rate of potential editors is  about 1 in 32
for those who write potentially useful articles that nonetheless get
rejected  as compared to 1 in 22 of those whose articles get accepted.
That means that our procedures for scaring away editors of rejected
articles only scare away 1/3 of the possibly good ones, and 2/3
persist nonetheless. I am not sure how much better we can get it
without doing very extensive work with those editors.

We might get a higher yield by working with  editors who make edits,
but not new articles, encouraging them to continue to make others.
Anecdotally, many people edit to fix a single  error or add a single
fact , and never really want to do anything more.

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 7:11 AM, emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all;
>
> I think we can compare our retention rate with other communities like Wikia.
> If its retention rate is higher, we can learn from them, otherwise they can
> learn from us.
>
> Also, some months ago I read about a Facebook study which said that
> "Facebook users who edit their profiles in the first day, use to get
> involved". But now, I can't find that study.
>
> Regards,
> emijrp
>
> 2010/9/23 Peter Gervai <grinapo at gmail.com>
>
>> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 18:49, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It would take a major effort to get individual wiki communities to
>>
>> And by that you mean communities on enwp? :-)
>> People bite everywhere, and the reasons are the same as well, as you
>> properly pointed out. Enpw is the largest so people bite there most
>> often.
>>
>> > (That's because there's ridiculous amounts of complete rubbish to sift
>> > through. I'm not saying it's simple or easily remedied negligence on
>> > the part of existing community members, because if it was it would
>> > have been trivially remedied by now.)
>>
>> But still I agree that the original topic is mostly non-problem.
>>
>> Peter
>>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG