Anonymous editor acquisition

This is a 2013 Growth team project in Wikimedia Foundation Engineering.

Rationale and background
Anonymous editors are a significant part of the community of Wikipedia contributors. Every month about a million edits are made by anonymous contributors in English alone. While we have run reader and donor oriented acquisition campaigns in the past, these require a high degree of noise with little gain. We already know that anonymous editors who sign up are highly valuable new contributors. This year, we will be focusing on anonymous editor acquisition campaigns to increase the number of new registrations.

Project scope
As the title makes fairly clear, this project's scope is limited to ways that we can convince anonymous editors of Wikipedia to register accounts.

User stories

 * As someone who has anonymously contributed to Wikipedia many times, I want to be able to edit without interruptions or distractions.
 * As an anonymous contributor who is new to editing, I don't know why I should create an account on Wikipedia.
 * As a reader who knows something about this Wikipedia article, I want to know if I can edit it.

User experience
Our acquisition methods break down in three broad types:
 * 1) Invite anonymous editors to sign up, and demonstrate the advantages of having an account (explicitly or implicitly)
 * 2) Increase visibility of current calls to action or create new ones for attracting potential contributors who aren't yet registered
 * 3) Reduce signup friction by reducing the steps involved and requirements

Invite to sign up
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 view, 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 on notice makes up a significant number of registrations on the largest Wikipedias (between 9-15%).

Overall, Wikipedia makes few strong calls to register directed at anonymous editors. Only one is directed particularly at anonymous editors. We should experiment with more ways to invite anonymous editors to sign up, without being intrusive or annoying.

Calls to action
What ways can we either make current entry points to contributing more visible, or create new ones?

Currently visible to unregistered users:
 * Main Edit tab (may also be "edit source" depending on VisualEditor configuration)
 * VisualEditor Edit tab (some wikis)
 * Section edit links
 * Upload file (in auto-collapsed sidebar)
 * Stub tags ("This article is a stub, you can help Wikipedia by expanding it") with a direct link to page-level editing. Dependent on local community, and may wildly differ across projects/not exist.
 * Article issue templates, which often contain links to how-to guides and links to either Talk or page-level editing. Dependent on local community, and may wildly differ across projects/not exist.

Available only to registered users (not including advanced permissions):
 * Edit and section edit on semi-protected pages
 * Watchlist star
 * Wikidata "add links" button

Reduce sign-up friction
In addition to general usability enhancements that could be made to the account creation user experience, there are potential ways we could reduce friction specifically for users who are editing anonymously.


 * Save and sign up: as the user is about to save their edit anonymously, present the option to "save and sign up" or "save anonymously". If the user opts to sign up, present the signup form in-line with the save dialog. This first option works particularly well only if A) the user is using VisualEditor and B) the user is on a secure (HTTPS) connection. Alternatively, we could direct the user to sign up, then save the edit under their new account.


 * Implicit account creation: create an account in the background after a user saves their edits anonymously, using a pre-selected username and a temporary password. Offer to let the user "claim their account" and edits, including letting them rename their account and set a new password.

Research and data analysis

 * Research questions and associated data on Meta