Account Creation Improvement Project/Research/Overall

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You can get involved:

System-users.svg Spread the word by signing up and getting your community involved.
Red information icon with gradient background.svg Help build new messages for the account creation process by clicking here.
Orange Icon Talk.svg Discuss the open questions
Accessories-text-editor.svg Participate in the discussion on the project's talk page
Applications-development.svg 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:

  1. login page - where you end up after you click "login / create account"
  2. create account page - where you end up after you click "create one", with the fields that you need to fill in
  3. 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:

AB testing flowchart.JPG

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!

Account Creation Process statistics[edit]

File:Account creation paths.pdf
Account creation paths on enwiki and dewiki

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:

  1. 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)?
  2. How many people create a user account per day on the various projects?
  3. 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:

File:Percentage of new user accounts with at least one edit (August 2010).png
Percentage of new user accounts with at least one edit within 10 days after account creation (August 2010)
Project Number of
new user
accounts		 New accounts
with at least one edit
within the first 10 days
after creation		 Percent-
age
English Wikipedia 169,706 51,864 31%
Spanish Wikipedia 27,102 6,769 25%
German Wikipedia 17,963 6,221 34%
Russian Wikipedia 12,653 3,335 26%
Dutch Wikipedia 5,743 1,413 24%
Polish Wikipedia 5,393 1,255 23%
Swedish Wikipedia 3,992 1,190 30%
English Wikinews 2,801 2,798 100%
Hindi Wikipedia 1,293 121 9%
Tamil Wikipedia 807 82 10%
Bengali Wikipedia 677 74 11%
Malayalam Wikipedia 616 70 11%

How many new users make their first edit on the day of account creation?[edit]

The following data has been extracted from the Wikimedia Toolserver.[3] All data is for August 1–15, 2010 (smaller sample than above):

Project New accounts
with at least one edit
within the first 10 days
after creation		 New accounts
with at least one edit
on the day of
account creation		 Percent-
age
English Wikipedia 24,881 22,885 92%
Spanish Wikipedia 3,396 3,022 89%
German Wikipedia 2,894 2,617 90%
Russian Wikipedia 1,515 1,332 88%
English Wikinews 1,336 1,336 100%
Swedish Wikipedia 548 510 93%
Hindi Wikipedia 50 41 88%
Tamil Wikipedia 34 30 87%

How many new users edit their user page at least once shortly after account creation?[edit]

The following data has been extracted from the Wikimedia Toolserver.[4] All data is for August 1–15, 2010 (smaller sample than above):

Project New accounts
with at least one edit
within the first 10 days
after creation		 New users
who edit their user
page at least once
on day 1		 Percent-
age		 New users
who edit their user
page at least once
within the first
10 days		 Percent-
age
English Wikipedia 24,881 1,611 7% 2,045 8%
Spanish Wikipedia 3,022 113 3% 152 5%
German Wikipedia 2,894 200 7% 269 9%
English Wikinews 1,336 12 1% 13 1%


References[edit]

g
  1. ↑ 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;
  2. ↑ 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;
  3. ↑ 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;
  4. ↑ 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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