Research:Account creation campaigns/Anonymous editors
This page documents preliminary results from two account creation campaigns:
anoneditwarning— placed on MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning on English Wikipediasemiprotectednotice— placed on MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext on English Wikipedia
We launched and analyzed these two campaigns together because they target a very similar population of users. MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning is presented to all users editing while logged out, and invites them to either create an account or log in. MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext is presented to all users who click "View source" on a semi-protected page.
Preliminary data from first ~2 days
[edit ]These campaigns were launched on 2013年06月19日. We observed the following number of account creation events in the server-side account creation log, from the earliest event at 2013年06月19日 13:10:08 through 2013年06月21日 19:14:25:
anoneditwarning— 992 accounts registered (not counting one test account)semiprotectednotice— 5 accounts registered- 9310 total registrations (including 543 via mobile)
As you can see, users who sign up via the semi-protected notice comprise a tiny proportion of all registrations. Users who register via the anonymous editor notice comprise 10% of all signups during the same period – 11% if you do not include mobile users, who aren't presented with the option to edit – making them a not insignificant source of new Wikipedians. The very small number of registrations via the "View source" message can be accounted for by one of several potential explanations. First, the number of protected pages in the encyclopedia is relatively small. Second, of the users who might click "View source", they are confronted with a very verbose message with many links, unlike the anonymous editor message, which provides only three links in a one paragraph message.
Looking at the editing activity for these users, we see the following results for their edit counts across all namespaces in this time period:
anoneditwarning— 636 with 1+ edits (65%), 79 with 5+ (7%)semiprotectednotice— 5 accounts registered, two of which edited
Full month of data
[edit ]This following is anoneditwarning campaign data from August 2013. (One wiki with fewer than 10 signups removed.)
| Wiki | Anoneditwarning signups | Total signups | % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| enwiki | 14538 | 123156 | 12% |
| eswiki | 5052 | 27199 | 19% |
| frwiki | 1524 | 10582 | 14% |
| dewiki | 1375 | 7786 | 18% |
| zhwiki | 1284 | 14955 | 9% |
| jawiki | 983 | 4654 | 21% |
| ruwiki | 599 | 9298 | 6% |
| itwiki | 280 | 4261 | 7% |
| plwiki | 220 | 1888 | 12% |
| ptwiki | 211 | 8681 | 2% |
The following is a full month of anoneditwarning data from September 2013 (one wiki with fewer than 10 signups removed).
| Wiki | Anoneditwarning signups | Total signups | % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| enwiki | 12466 | 125063 | 10% |
| eswiki | 4929 | 27566 | 18% |
| frwiki | 1596 | 12512 | 13% |
| dewiki | 1245 | 7549 | 16% |
| zhwiki | 999 | 12751 | 8% |
| jawiki | 880 | 4370 | 20% |
| ruwiki | 542 | 10587 | 5% |
| itwiki | 335 | 4553 | 7% |
| plwiki | 237 | 2344 | 10% |
| ptwiki | 191 | 8166 | 2% |
See also
[edit ]- New account registrations by campaign, English Wikipedia
- New account registrations (anonymous edit CTA), all top 10 Wikipedias