This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant, or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you should seek broader input via a forum such as the Village pump.
Participate in the discussion on the project's talk page
Use the Toolserver if you have an account and analyse the existing data.
Before we can change the account creation process, we need to know what to change. That's why we're doing research. Together, we'll test different account creation pages, compare our experience with other top websites, ask new users for their opinion, and work to increase new user participation after account creation.
Research projects:
The project has started by posting a survey on several Wikipedia's MediaWiki:Welcomecreation pages, which appears after a user creates their account, asking them why they joined. Our first survey's results have been posted at this page.
How many people click on "create user account" and don't follow through?
From September 22 on, we're logging user clicks on the Wikimedia logging server to get a daily "account abandonment". We turned on clicktracking for the "Create account" page. We measure how many people land on this page and how many of those actually fill out all the information and click on the "Create account" button.
After running the clicktracking for about 6 hours on September 22, we estimate that about 21% of users follow through the current account creation process. This is for all languages and all Wikimedia projects. More data and project breakdowns to follow.
How many people create a user account in a given month?
↑select DAY(user_registration) as day, count(user_id) from user where user_registration IS NOT NULL AND user_registration>"20100800000000" AND user_registration<"20100900000000" group by day;
↑SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (select DISTINCT user.user_id from user left JOIN user_daily_contribs ON user.user_id=user_daily_contribs.user_id where user_registration IS NOT NULL AND user_registration>"20100801000000" AND user_registration<"20100802000000" AND day>="2010-08-01" AND day<"2010-08-12") as dummy;
↑SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (select DISTINCT user.user_id from user left JOIN user_daily_contribs ON user.user_id=user_daily_contribs.user_id where user_registration IS NOT NULL AND user_registration>"20100801000000" AND user_registration<"20100802000000" AND day="2010-08-01") as dummy;
↑SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) FROM user, page, revision WHERE page_namespace=2 AND page_title=user_name AND rev_page=page_id AND rev_timestamp < '20100802000000' AND user_registration IS NOT NULL AND user_registration >= '20100801000000' AND user_registration < '20100802000000' GROUP BY user_name; and SELECT user_name, COUNT(*) FROM user, page, revision WHERE page_namespace=2 AND page_title=user_name AND rev_page=page_id AND rev_timestamp < '20100811000000' AND user_registration IS NOT NULL AND user_registration >= '20100801000000' AND user_registration < '20100802000000' GROUP BY user_name;
