Anonymous editor acquisition/Signup invites v2

This document describes proposed workflows for inviting anonymous editors to sign up for an account. This is currently part of the GettingStarted extension.

Current user experience
Currently, there are very few explicit invitations made to anonymous editors to sign up for an account. Not including help page documentation and other content that a reader would need to actively seek out, we know of only a few widespread calls to sign up for an account on Wikipedia:


 * 1) On every page, links to "create account" or "log in" are present. These are persistent and highly visible, but do not make it clear why a user would want an account.
 * 2) On the login page, there is a call to register if you do not already have an account. This makes up a surprisingly large chunk of registrations on some wikis.
 * 3) On many Wikipedias, there is a notice delivered on the edit mode (in VisualEditor and wikitext editor) which directs you to log in or sign up for an account. It also typically informs the user about exposing their IP as an anonymous editor, and in English it links to a page documenting the benefits of signing up. This one notice makes up a significant number of registrations on the largest Wikipedias (between 9-15%).

Proposed user experience


The following user stories are meant to help us what users want out of these interfaces:

As a regular anonymous editor, I want to be able to quickly get to editing without being interrupted.

As a first-time editor, I need to understand why I'm being asked to register and whether I can just keep editing anyway.

Specification: When an user that is not logged in clicks "Edit" or "Edit source", they will be presented with a guider that provides them two options: a primary button to go to account creation, and a secondary button to continue to the appropriate edit mode as an anonymous user. This would work the same for section editing, and regardless of how the wiki editing interfaces are configured, e.g. regardless of whether VisualEditor is enabled for anonymous editors or not. Explanatory text should be provided that warns the user that they will have their IP address saved in a page's revision history. If the user clicks edit again after the CTA appears, then the edit button will function as normal.

Version one
This version is the same as in the previous A/B test.



Version two
In this version, we are aiming to more strongly emphasize that A) registering is not required B) the user can continue editing immediately.

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Rationale and context
Preliminary results from the previous A/B test showed that we caused a 2-3x increase in new signups among anonymous editors. These users were either as successful at editing as signups in the control group, and in some cases better. However, we also caused an overall drop (-15%) in productive edits among unregistered users in the pre-edit condition. We have three potential theories about why this was the case, which are not mutually exclusive: Testing with a new version that emphasizes that registering is optional, as well as only showing the CTAs once by setting a cookie, should help us eliminate the first two theories as possibilities.
 * 1) We showed the pre-edit CTA multiple times per user. Showing this repeatedly caused people to get frustrated and refrain from editing.
 * 2) The pre-edit version may have suggested that editing was required.
 * 3) Interrupting users in any way causes them to be distracted or annoyed.

Implementation
Like the previous version, this will be built as a guided tour and hosted in the GettingStarted extension.

Testing methodology and data analysis
In order to compare the two iterations, we will be using the same metrics and analysis from the first A/B test.