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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 change things in the account creation process, we need to look into what we should change. That's why we are doing research. Just so we have the same terms, here is a chart of the account creation process:
login page - where you end up after you click "login / create account"
create account page - where you end up after you click "create one", with the fields that you need to fill in
landing page - where you are sent after you have filled out the fields and clicked the Create account button
We will test various versions of the three pages against each other. This is called A/B testing. 'A' stands for the page we have right now, and 'B' stands for the new version. We can test as many B:s as we have time for, and measure how they fare against each other. We will do these tests on several language versions of Wikipedia, beginning with A/B-testing the landing pages (3), and then the create account pages (2) and lastly the landing pages (1). For a visual representation of this, see this picture:
To make it easier to follow the research, it is divided into several pages. This page deals with the numbers of the account creation process. Then there are three pages for each of the steps in the process: step 1, step 2 and step 3.
We are also doing a survey on new users to see why they created their accounts.
If you feel that some aspect have been forgotten, or want to help out with the research, feel free to add your data or input on the relevant page. Thank you!
Before we attempt to do anything, we should find out what we need to do. The initial research tries to find answers to the following questions:
How many people click on "Don't have an account? Create one" and don't create a user account (i.e. don't submit the form via "create account" button)?
How many people create a user account per day on the various projects?
How many people create a user account and make at least 1 edit within the following 10 days?
How many people click on "create user account" and don't follow through?[edit]
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?[edit]
The following data has been extracted from the Wikimedia Toolserver.[1] All data is for August 2010:
Project
Number of new user accounts overall
New user accounts: average per day
English Wikipedia
169,706
5,474
Spanish Wikipedia
27,102
874
German Wikipedia
17,963
579
French Wikipedia
16,712
539
Russian Wikipedia
12,653
408
English Wiktionary
8,222
265
English Wikibooks
5,893
190
Dutch Wikipedia
5,743
185
Polish Wikipedia
5,393
174
Swedish Wikipedia
3,992
129
English Wikinews
2,801
90
Czech Wikipedia
2,686
87
Hungarian Wikipedia
2,602
84
Hindi Wikipedia
1,293
42
Tamil Wikipedia
807
26
Bengali Wikipedia
677
22
Malayalam Wikipedia
616
20
How many of these new user accounts are being used for editing?[edit]
The following data has been extracted from the Wikimedia Toolserver.[2] All data is for August 2010:
↑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;
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