Lars Aronsson wrote: > Platonides wrote: > > And many don't even perform one edit. As I don't believe so many people > > create them just to change their preferences, it is a mistery for me why > > do they do so. > > Becoming an active wikipedian is a process in many > steps, each involving a large amount of hesitation. > Does this article really need improvement? Can I > fix it? Should I fix it? Do I know how to edit? Do I > have the time right now? Should I register? After > having improved the text, should I really press > save, or should I just quit and forget about it? > > Maybe we have a million readers, and only 10% think > the article needs improvement, only 10% of them > think they could fix it, etc. We are losing people > in every step of hesitation from reader to active > contributor. It is really irrelevant in which step > we lose them. We may have a million readers and > we get a hundred contributors. These might be > 100 out of 1,000 registered users or 100 out of > 10,000 who thought about registering, or 100 out > of 5,000 who went half-way through registration. > The constant is 100 and the other number is > quite arbitrary. Any statistic based on that > arbitrary number is bound to be bad math.
There's good math to be had for the digging. Can you envision a leaky pipeline starting with the mass of readers' first visits to WP and the terminus at long-term editors. Something along the lines of https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kaplan%E2%80%93Meier_estimator seems appropriate, maybe someone can pick a more optimistic analogy. At each new obstacle the cohort shrinks. If it was possible to interest someone with statistical training to assemble actual data, I imagine it would be useful and entertaining. It might have to be collected prospectively. Would wiki-research-l be a better forum for this? -- Charles Polisher _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
