On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 02:49:33PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
But none of this will necessarily happen if you didn't do something to commit yourself first. It's the "foot in the door" principle: people who start small will be more willing to proceed to bigger things than they will be to start out with big things. What were *your* first edits to Wikipedia?
I think my first edit, if I recall correctly, was the creation of an entirely new article. I was searching for information about a specific dinosaur species, and didn't find anything in Wikipedia about it. I ended up having to find the information elsewhere, but once I had found it I remembered Wikipedia and came back to create the "missing" article so that the next person looking for the same information would find something.
I wonder how often new article creation happens as a "foot in the door" scenario, as contrasted with edits to existing articles. In the case of edits to existing articles, I tend to suspect that typo fixes might be among the highest percentage of first-time edits -- and that isn't really affected much by "weird" stuff like templates and heading wikimarkup.
Do we have any hard statistical evidence to support or disprove my guesstimations of first-time Wikipedia editing activities?