I don't want to stop the conversation and just want to thank you all for
the great input so far. I have not been able to read it all yet, but I hope
I get to do it soon :-)
Jan
2017-03-23 7:06 GMT+01:00 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com>:
> > A few years ago the WMF did a survey of former editors, partly to
> > learn why they'd left. One of the most common responses was "I haven't
> left yet".
>
> With the benefit of hindsight (a wonderful thing), that might be a bad way
> to have asked the question. A better way might have been to ask why they
> are no longer active and what circumstances/change would be likely to make
> them active again. What we really want to know if the reasons for
> inactivity are internal/external to Wikipedia and whether the conditions
> for re-engagement are internal/external to Wikipedia. And for the internal
> ones, we'd like to know more specifically what they are.
>
> "I haven't left yet, but as soon as my new baby has started school, I
> might have the time for Wikipedia again" (i.e. the cause of inactivity and
> return to activity is outside of Wikipedia's control). There is not a lot
> Wikipedia can do about such a contributors.
>
> "I left because I was sick and tired of the unpleasant way people behave,
> but I enjoyed contributing otherwise and would do so again if the culture
> was a lot nicer" is something that WP has some control over but not
> something you can fix in an afternoon.
>
> "I left because I just found it too hard, I kept forgetting when to use [[
> and when to use {{ and I never figured out that <ref> thing" is someone
> that we could potentially re-engage on the spot by saying "hey, try the
> Visual Editor!".
>
> Or maybe "I haven't left yet" is more literally true than we think. It is
> possible that the person is still active on Wikipedia but under a different
> user name or as an IP so they just appear to have become inactive under
> their former user name. If a person has had some unpleasant experiences on
> Wikipedia and that is why they became inactive, there are a lot of good
> reasons why they might not like to return under the same user name.
> Wikipedia has an infinitely long memory for things like bans and blocks and
> watch lists last forever. If you got yourself in trouble previously but you
> want to start afresh, you probably want to create a new account. If you had
> bad experiences with some other user who was regularly unpleasant to you,
> you would want a new account as they can watch your User page and Talk page
> forever to detect if you ever return. *Changing* your user name doesn't
> solve that problem, creating a new account does. And of course you may just
> have forgotten your username or your password and created a new account.
>
> Personally, I am inclined to think that the "I haven't left yet" editors
> (who aren't active under another user name) are probably effectively lost
> to us. Some other interest has almost certainly chewed up their spare time
> during their absence from Wikipedia. There's a big gap between "I'm not
> saying No" to "I'm saying Yes".
>
> The other issue is that even if the desired circumstances for
> re-engagement are in place, you still need some kind of way to communicate
> this fact to the "lost users". Given that providing an email address isn’t
> mandatory on creating an account, we can only communicate with those who
> did provide an email address and hope it is still an active one.
>
> For example, perhaps we should be emailing all the "lost users" (where we
> can) periodically and saying "Hey, try that Visual Editor" or "get involved
> with #1Lib1Ref" or mentioning some other positive thing that might convince
> them to give it another go.
>
> It's been said (and I really don't know if it's true) that people respond
> better to being needed than to being wanted. Maybe we can use that in
> Project Boomerang. Find an article that the lost user has made a lot of
> contributions to but which hasn't grown much since (ignoring all the
> re-categorisations, MoS enforcements, reverted vandalisms, and other edits
> that don't greatly enhance the information content of an article) and tell
> them that article XYZ needs them to come and keep it up-to-date.
>
> In sales, they often say it is 10x the effort to get a new customer than
> to retain an existing one. Maybe instead of putting effort into onboarding
> new users (who we have to put through a massive learning curve very fast or
> watch them die the slow death of many reverts and AfC rejections), we
> should put more effort into re-engaging lost users (there's less of a
> learning curve to bring them back).
>
> Kerry
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Jan Dittrich
UX Design/ User Research
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0
http://wikimedia.de
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sum of all knowledge. That‘s our commitment.
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