While operationalizing the Contributors strategy metrics we observed some user behaviors:
- a new user creates a manual (self-created) account on a wikipedia, and then immediately creates another new (auto-created) account on a new wikipedia and makes their first constructive edit there, all within 24hrs
- sometimes they create new auto-created accounts on a bunch of new wikipedias and edit in one or multiple of these auto-created accounts instead of the manually registered wiki.
- a new user creates a manual (self-created) account on a wikipedia, and then creates new (auto-created) accounts on other language wikipedias over the next few months and activates on these new wikis.
We are curious to know
- how prevalent is this behavior?
- we found that more than half of the self-created accounts in a month (looked at Nov and Jun 2025 data) have auto-created accounts associated with them (query)
- is there a pattern- i.e. does this happen on certain wikipedias only?
- what motivates them to switch to auto-created accounts on other wikis and not edit on the manually registered wiki?
- is there a lack of certain features on the self-created wiki that the user is looking for to edit for the first time?
- are there certain features in the auto created wiki that the user found helpful for editing and doing their activation edit?
Some more questions from @KStoller-WMF -
- What proportion of users begin editing on a non-Wikipedia project and later become contributors on Wikipedia.
- What proportion of users start on a larger Wikipedia and later begin editing on smaller wikis (and vice-vera).
This kind of insight could help inform product decisions like:
- How we implement Growth features for autocreated accounts.
- If we prioritize work to show global contributor impact (for Impact data & Year in Review metrics).
- How much we want to invest in scaling Growth features to non-Wikipedias