Of the Czech and Korean newcomers who open an editor, about 27% of Czechs and 29% of Koreans don't save an edit.
Perhaps we could consider a QuickSurvey (screenshot) that asks these users a single question as to why they didn't complete their edit ("I'm confused", "I don't have time now", etc).
@KHarlan (WMF) -- I think that's almost exactly what MoodBar did, which @RHo (WMF) looked into when our team was planning the help panel (see this task). I think there probably was some good information collected, but the feature was pulled back because the experienced editors weren't going through the queue of feedback and responding to it. I wonder whether it would be easy to bring that feature back to life on our target wikis for a limited time, to see what people say.
@MMiller (WMF) Thanks for link, I had forgotten about that task. AFAICT QuickSurvey seems to be pretty low impact in terms of engineering effort. We could research exactly what's entailed if you're interested.
If we decide to try this, something to consider as well is tying the quick survey with help panel. For a user who abandons the edit (and has not already used the help panel), we could include a link in the quick survey to open the help panel if the answer chosen was something like "I couldn't figure out to do something" or "It was too hard to edit".
When reading this finding, it made me think of a few participants from the New Editor Experiences research, who informed the "audience builder" persona. A few of those particpants had added information about themselves on their user pages. One in particular said he wanted a "profile" like there is on various social media platforms. This particular participant wanted a "profile" on Wikipedia because it is a world wide audience, and he wanted his "profile" to show up when people searched for his name online (he didn't understand that user pages aren't indexed). The few examples of this were people whose motivation to add content to Wikipedia were to build an audience for themselves, a product they were building, or a book they had authored. A few of the other audience builders were more focused on building an audience for a business (larger than just themselves), and so attempted to create article pages for that business. I am wondering if people create a user page right away, would it indicate they might be an audience builder? I am not sure about that, but wanted to share this thought, as it might help us to determine a user's motivation, thus which persona they might represent.
P.S I read the finding as them creating their user pages in their first day, but then talked with Marshall, and he corrected my understanding that the new editors were viewing the user page before it is created (the page that one lands on when clicking the redlink to then create a user page) , and did not actually create their user pages.
This particular participant wanted a "profile" on Wikipedia because it is a world wide audience, and he wanted his "profile" to show up when people searched for his name online (he didn't understand that user pages aren't indexed).
This kind of people were what led kowiki to noindex of userpages <_< (Just my 2 cents)
hi @ARipstra (WMF) - I'm also interested in digging further into reasons a relatively high number of people may be going to their User page after account creation. It would be great to get a break down the views by mobile/desktop, since my hypothesis is that it could be mostly mobile users going to the User page since it is a much more prominent menu item on mobile view and may be where people expect find profile completion or 'getting started' content.
One of the things I'm wondering about is whether building one's user page is or is not a good introduction to Wikipedia editing. It's sort of like a sandbox, in that it's a low pressure place to try out editing, plus it can potentially evolve into a valuable set of contributions for a future active editor. On the other hand, it may continue to allow new editors to be under the impression that they are making "their Wikipedia article", and then to be disappointed when they figure out that's not what they have done. Perhaps there is a way to alter the experience of creating a User page to make it clear what is or is not happening.
In Czech Wikipedia, 8.3% of new users visit a page in the Help namespace as their first action after account creation. This number is higher than in Korean Wikipedia, but it is currently difficult to tell how much higher, since Korean help pages are incorporated into the Wikipedia namespace
It's not uncommon to see on help / documentation pages for other websites something like "Did you find this page helpful?" with a "yes" or "no"; while I'm uncertain of how well that would work for rating help pages on Wikipedia, it might be worth considering as a way to gather some insight into whether the users visiting the help pages find that their questions are answered.
