Wikipedia doesn’t require to you to sign up for an account. We like giving everything away for free, and even let people edit without creating an account. But if you’d like to register, there are plenty of good reasons to do so.

The current signup page in English

However, it’s been a long time since the registration process for Wikipedia got any love. In fact, it’s pretty clunky, and it may be contributing to the decline in successful registrations in the last few years.

To address this, we’ve started testing changes to the account creation page on English Wikipedia this week. We’ve updated the visual design to be far less cluttered and expose a clearer structure, and reduced the amount of instructional text that appears before the form. As a side benefit, mobile users should find the page easier to use, though our mobile team is working on further enhancements, too.

We’ve also added a simple list of benefits to account creation, such as being able to start new pages, upload photos, and have a presence in the Wikipedia community, but these won’t appear on small screen sizes. In a second iteration, we’ll be adding live validation to the form, so you will know if there are any errors right away.

Our mockup

Please note: the new look is delivered only 50% of the time, as part of an A/B test, so the best thing to do if you want to give us feedback is to comment on the mockup here, or on our documents related to design and data analysis.

Some readers here may remember that back in 2011, a Fellowship project on account creation experimented with ways to encourage people to edit during or immediately after the signup process. However, basic limitations in the core functionality still plagued that project, not to mention anyone trying to create an account.

For this work, we’re focused on simply making the signup page itself be a less frustrating experience, with the secondary goal of gently introducing people to why an account is useful. After the trial, we’ll be permanently incorporating features that help more people register.

Steven Walling, Associate Product Manager
S Page, Software Engineer
Munaf Assaf, User Experience Designer

Every month, hundreds of thousands of people press the edit button on Wikipedia for the very first time. And for many of these new users, the first (and sometimes only) message that appears on their user talk page is a template rather than a human response. This is especially true on our larger, older projects.

User talk page templates were developed by the community because of the tremendous volume of contributions that began pouring in as Wikipedia grew more and more popular. Today, with the focus of our movement shifting to openness and attracting new editors, it’s time to rethink the message we’re sending via templates.

That’s why Steven Walling and I have started a project to A/B test many of the template messages received by new users, such as warnings and deletion notices. In collaboration with over 20 members of the Wikimedia community, including the English and Portuguese Wikipedias so far, we’ve designed a number of experiments that will give us tangible data to improve communication on the projects.

How it works

With the help of tools developed by our summer researchers, different messages we want to test are randomly delivered to different groups of users. Tracking the data from these two groups, we can assess the efficacy of different kinds of messages, based on whether users continue to edit constructively after receiving them.

Our working hypothesis, which we are continuing to test and refine, is that making templates more personal will help retain the good-faith editors who receive them, while continuing to detract vandals, spammers, and other bad-faith editors. For both groups, showing them that the encyclopedia is built through the hard work of other people like them is key.

What you can do

There are thousands of different user talk page templates on Wikimedia projects. We need your help to construct and carry out more tests, especially in non-English communities!

Please visit our task force page on English Wikipedia or our interlanguage hub on Meta and sign up. You can add your project to the list if you’re interested in starting new tests.

This is the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation has devoted resources to helping test and improve the template infrastructure the community uses every day to function. We hope that together, we can significantly improve the way Wikimedia projects communicate with editors.

Thank you,
Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling