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Segmentation of new editors
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Description

This task is somewhat related to "Understanding first day", although it is not explicitly part of that project's scope. We should discuss and think if or when it would be good to work on this.

"Understanding first day" is all about learning what new account holders do between when they create their account and when they make their first edit (or not). One open question is: what kind of edits do newcomers make? Do they make small ones? Do they write new articles? Do they edit popular articles or obscure ones? Are there certain types of edit patterns that most newcomers exhibit?

Perhaps it is possible to look at the content of the edits of a newcomer's first session by using the public data in the user and revision tables, and classify them into segments, like "single small correction" or "new article creation" or "vandalism". It would be additionally illuminating to know which of those first sessions resulted in reverts.

By counting all this up, we would learn more about what new editor activities are common, and what actions lead up to those activities. Ultimately, this would help us guide new editors toward productive contributions.

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Event Timeline

MMiller_WMF renamed this task from Growth: segmentation of new editors to Understanding first day: segmentation of new editors.Oct 9 2018, 11:02 PM
SBisson changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Oct 16 2018, 1:06 PM
SBisson changed the subtype of this task from "Feature Request" to "Task".Oct 16 2018, 6:41 PM
MMiller_WMF renamed this task from Understanding first day: segmentation of new editors to Segmentation of new editors.Jan 9 2019, 7:21 PM

Removed this from the "Understanding first day" epic because that epic has become all about EditorJourney. This is now a free agent analytics task.

I wonder if it would be better to relate analytics tasks to specific metrics on Wikitech or some other site, as a task only description with no links opens a wast array of possible interpretations. I dumped into this while searching for possible ways of analyzing new contributors, and after more than 10 years on Wikipedia I still have trouble figuring out what this is about.

Trying to read the opening description together with T206577#4867260, err… Quite frankly, I don't have the slightest clue…

@jeblad -- thanks for pointing out that this task was hard to understand. I just updated the description with some links and hopefully clearer language. Does that help? We've actually also recommended this task as something someone could work at Wikimedia Hackathon in May.