Research:Edit form clicktracking
Contact
Vibha Bamba
Howie Fung
Maryana Pinchuk
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 edit
This project is intended to track usage of key elements on the edit form, in order to inform future UX/UI redesign work.
Methods edit
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 edit
Data collection will be performed under the terms of the Wikimedia Privacy Policy.
Results edit
Edit form actions by editor class and namespace edit
- Graphs of save/preview actions by 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