Account creation user experience/Benefits of signing up

Requirements for content to convey the benefits of signing up for a MediaWiki project.

Benefits list
During the A/B testing of the current interface, we tested a list of three benefits titled "Why create an account?", each with a header, icon, and descriptive sentence. The copy tested was as follows:


 * Create articles: After signing up, you'll be able to help Wikipedia grow by starting new encyclopedia articles.
 * Add photos and video: Register an account and you can upload your freely-licensed images and other media.
 * Become a part of the Wikipedia community: Logging in means all your contributions are attributed to your username, and lets you connect with other Wikipedia contributors.

We've come to the conclusion that this style of benefits list should not be productized. Tests which removed these benefits showed little to no measurable difference, and remote tests where users stopped to read the benefits also demonstrated that they could increase distractions. It's likely that users have for the most already decided to create an account and selling it further is not helping them a great deal. Finally, localization of these benefits presents a challenge, as each Wikimedia project would need a customized set of benefits.

Site statistics
Much like Wikipedia:About and http://www.reddit.com/about, statistics about our communities can be used as a form of social proof to convince users this is a site worth joining. By using statistics are built in to MediaWiki already as magic words, we can easily build a look at the size of a wiki and its community in to the account creation page which is easy to localize. The first version we will productize uses the following content:

is made by people like you.


 * pages
 * edits
 * contributors this month

Alternative test ideas

 * 1) Test alternate content (see old revision for ideas)
 * 2) Add a "Learn more" link below the list, which goes to Wikipedia:Why create an account?
 * 3) Replace benefits with a user story video and large quote.
 * 4) Replace benefits with some sort of real-time feed visualization of edit activity to exhibit the vitality of the site. Demo

Benefits statement
It is a common design pattern for home pages or signup landing pages to include a single sentence clearly describing the purpose and benefits of having an account with the service. This is also a better balance between relevance to the project and difficulty of l10n/i18n.

This benefits statement would need to be customized per project as well as per language, but one for Wikipedia might be...


 * Contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

Mission statement
A similar but slightly different alternative to the copy and examples in the "Benefits statement" section is a reiteration of the general Wikipedia/Wikimedia mission, probably as expressed through the classic Jimmy Wales quote.