Wikipedia:Requests for comment/English Wikipedia readership survey 2013/What proportion of readers are aware that they can edit

Of the readers who are aware that they can edit, but choose not to, why?

A substantial amount of initiatives in Wikipedia are focused on increasing the ease of editing (e.g. mw:VisualEditor, but is that really the problem? Do people choose not to edit because they simply don't have time?  Maybe they do have time, but think that they are competent enough to contribute to an encyclopedia.  -- EpochFail  (talk &bull; work) 14:39, 3 May 2013 (UTC)


 * My personal investigating of work colleagues and family is that while they know it can be edited, they have little idea about how easy it is, and/or they fear being I unwelcome or getting involved in an online brawl. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:22, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
 * We know that only a tiny proportion of readers edit, 22 out of every million English speakers are currently active and whilst only a minority of English speakers read Wikipedia, that minority is in the hundreds of millions. We could ask people why they don't or why they've stopped, but it would be more logical to use our former editor surveys to try and find out to what extent we lose people through edit conflicts, deletionism and competing demands on their time. We are already pretty sure that our core demographic is bright altruistic nerds with spare time. Hopefully the visual editor will broaden our appeal beyond people who can handle the user interface. We have editor surveys that tell us that our editors are generally more educated than the average, and as we don't really want to dumb down the pedia I don't see much point in doing research as to how to make Wikipedia editing more attractive to people who aren't particularly smart. And the biggest hurdle is probably altruism, most people are insufficiently altruistic to help us, and many non altruists have a hard time understanding or even respecting altruism. So I'd be inclined not to ask this question unless we have a filtering question that allows us to screen out non-altruists.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  09:09, 5 May 2013 (UTC)


 * This could be complicated. Just recently there was some discussion in a newsgroup concerning a certain word in an en.wp article that appeared to be a (mis)translation from the de.wp version. One of the participants (with only two previous edits, elsewhere, a couple of years ago) resolved to improve it. He logged in, found the Talk page (empty aside from a project banner), read the Feedback (one featured message complaining of poor translation) and then put a comment on the page, signed and everything -- later posting to the newsgroup that he'd only done so because he'd forgotten how to edit an article (and might return to the problem in the distant future). The mind boggles.—Odysseus 1 4 7  9  05:12, 2 June 2013 (UTC)