Some of these things are more difficult to test than others, and indeed some
are easier to resolve than others. I'm pretty sure that we lose a lot of new
editors due to edit conflicts. I suspect we can define the people who become
active editors as being the people who learn how to resolve edit conflicts
without losing their edit. Unfortunately there are no public logs of edit
conflicts, but it should be possible to create such logs and test how
predictive they are of people stopping editing. If such research produced the
expected result that this was one of the major reasons why we lose editors,
then there are some minor fixes that have been languishing for years in
phabricator and its predecessors so we could easily halve the number of edit
conflicts. If the research showed that edit conflicts weren't driving people
away from the pedia then we would have learned something surprising, and that
is always a good thing.
At the other end of the transition scale we have a very very long tail of
occasional editors. I suspect there is a large group of people among them who
think of themselves as Wikipedia users but who will fix the odd typo or other
error if they come across it. I'm assuming such individual editors now edit
more rarely as they encounter fewer typos etc on Wikipedia. Rather than worry
that these editors are editing more rarely, I would like to find a way of
measuring such a group that lets us count their finding fewer typos per hundred
hours of reading as a positive sign of quality improvement rather than as a
decline in editing numbers.
Regards
Jonathan
On 23 Mar 2017, at 06:06, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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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