Editor engagement



Growing Wikipedia and its community

Editor engagement projects encourage the growth of the volunteer community that builds the free encyclopedia. They include efforts to retain existing editors, as well as to engage new contributors to participate on Wikipedia. To advance these goals, the Wikimedia Foundation is working with community members on a range of new projects, which you can read about below.

Here is the problem

We call this the oh $#!& graph.

In early 2007, the number of active editors plateaued and then started decreasing. The rate at which new editors stick around plateaued even earlier, in early 2005, and then dropped sharply. These numbers haven't improved.

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What's new

Here are some of our most recent reports and milestones.

New research: Editor milestones

In this recent experiment, we sent a personalized thank you barnstar to all users who reached their 1,000th edit for articles on English Wikipedia. Here’s what we learned about the effects of personalized recognition for editors on the verge of becoming "established" Wikipedians.

Helping readers improve Wikipedia

The editor engagement team has developed a new version of the Article Feedback Tool, which invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. Here are the findings from our first test.

Who we are

Product managers, community organizers, developers, designers, and analysts.

 See the rest of the team

What we are doing Here's a short list of our current projects aimed at improving editor engagement. Check out each talk page for comments or questions!