User:DarTar/AnonContribs

From reader to contributor
Engaging with anonymous contributors and converting them into registered users and active editors is one of the goals of the editor engagement program. Wikipedia's user account registrations have undergone a slow, but steady year-to-year decline since 2007 (between -50% and -60% on the English Wikipedia), but – what's even worse – the contributor to reader ratio has plummeted over the last few years due to the very fast growth in Wikimedia projects global readership. This means that our projects are failing to empower new people in producing and participating in open collaborative projects.

A number of projects such Article Feedback, Wiki Loves Monuments or the Mobile contributory funnel are trying to bridge the gap from passive readers, to "active readers" (or microcontributors) to editors. The main blocker for these projects to bridge this gap is the lack of "protoaccounts" to represent the persistence of anonymous contributors across sessions and, consequently, the lack of a workable solution for notifying these users and converting them into registered users.

We know that receiving positive feedback and participating in the production of a public good is one of the strongest drivers of participation and motivation for new Wikipedians. However, notifying anonymous contributors is technically and legally challenging, for the aforementioned reasons.

The following is a proposal to build an easy on-ramp for anonymous contributors by using anonymous tokens as "lightweight protoaccounts". I'll review the current use of anonymous tokens and their possible use to convert anonymous contributor into registered users with minimum technical and legal overheads.

Tokens
The most simple implementation of a "protoaccount" (or a persistent, anonymous identifier for unregistered desktop or mobile users) is a token. MediaWiki generates a so called "anonymous token" via the  function (src). The function is currently called on every single page of the English Wikipedia on which the article feedback extension is enabled (i.e. all articles in the main namespace, except for redirects) and by the new account creation extension. If the user is not logged in and doesn't have a cookie called, the   function will set one, with an expiry time of 1 year. The expiration time is reset each time the ID is queried, so in most cases this ID will persist until the browser's cookies are cleared or the user doesn't visit for 1 year. This means that virtually every unregistered (desktop or mobile) user receives such a token. The token in itself is just a hash and doesn't store any information.