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A report on the Account Creation Improvement Project and the Fellowship By Lennart Guldbrandsson Table of contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 4 Overview of the project and the Fellowship ................................................................................................. 4 Timeline ................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Before the Fellowship ............................................................................................................................................... 4 The Fellowship .......................................................................................................................................................... 4 After the Fellowship .................................................................................................................................................. 5 Participants and method .......................................................................................................................................... 5 The lay of the land .......................................................................................................................................... 6 The original account creation process ..................................................................................................................... 6 The technical aspect .................................................................................................................................................. 6 The content aspect ..................................................................................................................................................... 7 The ”before” statistics ............................................................................................................................................. 8 The surveys .............................................................................................................................................................. 9 Results ..................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Comments from people taking the survey ................................................................................................................ 11 Testing it live ................................................................................................................................................. 12 The low-quality tests ............................................................................................................................................. 12 Samples of versions that were tested: ..................................................................................................................... 13 Results of the first tests ........................................................................................................................................... 14 The backlash with version 2 .................................................................................................................................... 14 CustomUserSignup ................................................................................................................................................ 15 The high-quality tests ............................................................................................................................................ 16 The user page creator ............................................................................................................................................. 16 Step 0 and 1: ...................................................................................................................................................... 17 Step 2: ................................................................................................................................................................ 17 Step 3: ................................................................................................................................................................ 18 Step 4: ................................................................................................................................................................ 18 The new user bar template ................................................................................................................................. 19 Category:New Wikipedians ............................................................................................................................... 21 The Sparked.com model .......................................................................................................................................... 21 Step 0 and 1: ...................................................................................................................................................... 22 Step 2: ................................................................................................................................................................ 22 Step 3: ................................................................................................................................................................ 23 Step 4: ................................................................................................................................................................ 23 Results ................................................................................................................................................................... 24 What we measure and why ...................................................................................................................................... 24 The raw data ........................................................................................................................................................... 24 Crunching the numbers ........................................................................................................................................... 25 All account creation processes ........................................................................................................................... 25 ACP1 .................................................................................................................................................................. 25 ACP2 .................................................................................................................................................................. 25 ACP3 .................................................................................................................................................................. 26 Total scores ........................................................................................................................................................ 26 Which account creation process is better? ............................................................................................................. 26 Other results and aspects ........................................................................................................................................ 27 Final thoughts ............................................................................................................................................... 28 Further research ..................................................................................................................................................... 28 Appendices .................................................................................................................................................... 29 Survey 1 ................................................................................................................................................................. 29 Survey 2 ................................................................................................................................................................. 30 Page 2 Interpreting the results ............................................................................................................................................ 30 List of MediaWiki messages involved in the account creation process ............................................................... 32 Log In / Create Account page ................................................................................................................................. 32 User Create Page .................................................................................................................................................... 32 Confirmation page .................................................................................................................................................. 33 Function that checks for available usernames ....................................................................................................... 34 The code .................................................................................................................................................................. 34 Implementation