Talk:Movement Insights

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I think this is necessary to redirect other talk pages here. Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

(The lack of) registration decline on Commons

There is a recently published analysis on registration decline on many Wikipedia sites by Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF). It looks like Commons is the exception where the decline did not happen. Any more insight on why?

A part of the explanation might be how auto-created accounts are treated in the analysis. The report says auto-created accounts are excluded from the data. That is reasonable in general, but I wonder if it makes the Commons data non-representative in some sense. I feel like auto-created accounts are the norm on Commons in particular - I believe most Commons users have edited other wikis first, and that is by design because Commons is a supporting project to a large extent. (How does Wikidata compare, for that matter?) whym (talk) 06:28, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

@Whym hi and thank you for reading!

You're probably right that Commons has a much higher proportion of contributors with non-autocreated accounts (unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to check).

However, I don't think that fact significantly changes the picture. My focus was on people new to Wikimedia taking their first step to participating, and auto-create registrations are just not in that category. So, to the extent that people don't take take their first step on Commons, it just doesn't fit into the study.

But it turns out that a significant number of people do seem to take their first step on Commons—it's the number 5 wiki in terms of total non-autocreate registrations since July 2015 (right after SUL finalization). So, for whatever reason, the rate of people taking their first step on Commons doesn't seem to be impacted as much as on other wikis. Maybe that's because Commons doesn't have many "readers", so people who do visit there are likely to be particularly interested.

Also, even though you probably already realize this, I'll just note that, although you're correct that the steep decline that's the focus of this report didn't happen at Commons, a separate and apparently milder decline has been happening: "registrations declined by 17% between 2019 and 2024, [which] was due to a reduction in outlier months with more than 3,000 registrations." As I noted in a footnote, in my not-super-recent experience, outlier months like those are usually due to competitions like Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments, so a possible explanation is a decline in participation in those contents. I don't really have the background to say if that should be concerning or not 😊 Neil Shah-Quinn (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 10 February 2025 (UTC)