Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Welcome survey

I still do not understand why does the Welcome Survey exists if the Wikimedia community does not have access to the Welcome Survey. In fact, it would help the Wikimedia community if, for example, it would know if the majority of accounts are created for reading Wikipedia.

Hello @NGC 54 ,

We have shared summaries from the Welcome Survey previously that includes this type of information:

- Welcome survey initial report

- Welcome survey editor activation rate

But I understand that's not quite what you are looking for. I agree it would be nice for communities to pull exact metrics for each wiki. I believe there is considerable complexity involved in making this data publicly queryable, so it would require deprioritizing other work.

If there is a certain question you have, we might be able to pull the data for a specific request. Are you most interested in the breakdown of how people answer the "Why did you create an account today?" question? Which languages are you interested in?

@KStoller-WMF: I am interested in Romanian, and I want to know the reasons provided for creating the account only because on ro.wikipedia.org there are many accounts created that have not made any edit (per log).

@NGC 54 OK, I'll see if this is data we can pull and pass along. I won't have an answer for you immediately, but I'll try to get back to you next week.

It's definitely interesting to learn that a somewhat high percentage of newcomers select "To read Wikipedia" as why they created an account: ~18% on Czech Wikipedia, and ~29% on Korean Wikipedia. (From Welcome survey initial report#Why did you create your account today?)

@NGC 54 To answer your question about why people register on Romanian Wikipedia: here's the breakdown of how people respond to "Why did you create an account today?"

27% To create a new Wikipedia article

26% To read Wikipedia

17% To add or change information to a Wikipedia article

15% To fix a typo or error in a Wikipedia article

11% "Other" or "I'm participating in a program, class, or event"

4% To add a photo or image to a Wikipedia article

This data is from the last six months: 2022/01/21 - 2022/07/21.

I don't have data specific for Romanian Wikipedia, but in a recent experiment the Growth team conducted, it was found that only about 27% of newly created accounts edit within 24 hours. The newest Growth features help improve that to a little over 30%.

I hope that helps!

I am surprised that there are so much people who created an account in order to read Wikipedia, when in fact, the account does not improve the reading experience.

@NGC 54 Agreed, it's a bit surprising. This is a potential opportunity to engage new editors, but also an opportunity to better meet those readers needs and provide an improved or personalized experience for readers. This is something we have been discussing with the Reading / Web Team, and something our research team plans to investigate.

Do you have any suggestions for features you think readers want or expect to see after they create an account?

Just in case you are interested in following along, we hope to provide a better answer to your question, about why so many people create accounts to "read Wikipedia" in this project:

Growth/Non-editing participation

Hello! When will it be possible to get the results about the Russian Wikipedia? :)

Hi @Iniquity -- we posted the results from your wiki's welcome survey here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T259768. The main thing we were looking for is whether the welcome survey caused fewer newcomers to participate. We found that it does not, so that's good. Does that make sense? Or are you asking about getting results from the questions asked on the survey, in terms of how many newcomers give each response?

Hello, @MMiller (WMF)! I saw a general research, thank you very much for the publication! And yes, I am talking about answers to the questions from the survey. I would like to know what they answer, and how many of them ignore the survey.

@MMiller (WMF), hi :) Any answer, please? :)

Hi @Iniquity -- thank you for the reminder. I will talk about this with the team and get back to you next week.

Thanks! I'll be waiting :)

@MMiller (WMF), hi :) How progress in this? :)

@Iniquity -- last week, we asked some other departments at WMF about whether and how we can share this data publicly. They want to make sure we can share it in a way that complies with our data privacy directives. When we get some guidelines from them, then we can move on to figuring out when we can generate the data. Thank you for staying interested!

Hi 188.123.231.36 -- thanks for looking at the welcome survey and thinking about it. Your change was reverted because the list on the page is a list of responses that are currently on the survey, and not a prospective one for the future. But your idea makes sense: I think it is possible that some people create accounts so that they can get userpages and preferences and all those things. But at the same time, we don't think that is a very common reason, since most people creating accounts probably do not know yet that those things are available. So in the interests of keeping the list of responses brief, we haven't included it. Do you think it is important to include? What percent of account-creators do you think might have that motivation?