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Research:Edit form clicktracking

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This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.


Project Summary

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This project is intended to track usage of key elements on the edit form, in order to inform future UX/UI redesign work.

Methods

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The clicktracking extension was enabled for a period of four days on English Wikipedia, in order to analyze and document button usage on the edit form.

Wikimedia Policies, Ethics, and Human Subjects Protection

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Data collection will be performed under the terms of the Wikimedia Privacy Policy.

Results

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Edit form actions by editor class and namespace

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Anonymous
  • Unregistered/anonymous editors are far more likely to edit the article namespace
  • They are also more likely to use the save button than the preview button in all namespaces except Wikipedia.
Registered, 0 edits
  • Registered editors with no lifetime edits performed about ten times fewer edit form actions during the test phase than anonymous editors
  • These editors were more likely to use the preview button than anonymous editors, and they used it more than save in the user namespace
  • These editors were arriving at the edit form from the user namespace at a much higher rate than anonymous editors
  • 20% of these editors were attempting to edit their user sandbox (the link appears on the top navbar only to registered users)
Registered, 1-9 edits
  • Registered new editors also tend to use the preview button more than anonymous editors, and they also edit more frequently in the user namespace
Registered, 10-99 edits
  • Registered editors perform a higher number of preview and save actions in the article namespace than very novice editors
  • They continue to arrive from the user namespace more than other namespaces besides article
Registered, 100-999 edits
  • Moderately experienced editors perform a larger proportion of preview actions than 10-99 edit editors
  • They also arrive at the edit form less frequently from the user namespace and Wikipedia namespace, and more often from the template namespace than novice editors
Registered, 1,000-9,999 edits
  • Experienced Wikipedians edit more namespaces more frequently
  • They continue to rely on the preview button
Registered, 10,000+ edits
  • Very experienced Wikipedians continue to rely on the preview button
  • They tend to perform more editing actions in more namespaces

References

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