90% of Wikia readers are lurkers

Posted by Angela Beesley on January 25, 2007 (Community, Wikia, Wiki)

I’ve just put the results of a small scale study Wikia carried out last year on the wiki. The study aimed to find out how many of our page views were from logged in users compared to people who were not logged in. We were testing out Jakob Nielsen’s statement that “90% of users are lurkers who never contribute“.

Jacob was exactly right. Sampling 1% of 3.5 million page views across all Wikia sites on one day in November 2006 showed that 90% of readers were not logged in.

There were a couple of interesting exceptions amongst our most popular wikis. At Star Wars Fanon, 70% of page views were from logged in users. The Spanking Art Wikia was at the other end of scale, where logged in users account for only 1% of page views. Presumably those interested in Star Wars Fanon are already involved in a Star Wars community and they’re visiting the wiki because they want to both read and write this fan-fiction. People looking for pictures of spanking, on the other hand, probably aren’t there because they want to join a community. Both are popular wikis in terms of page views, but the Star Wars Fanon one is much more successful in terms of what Wikia is trying to do, which is build wiki-based communities, not simply attract uninvolved visitors. It’s a very noticeable difference to Wikia’s community team since Star Wars Fanon is a demanding wiki that often needs our attention, whereas we rarely hear from any users of the Spanking Art wiki despite its popularity in terms of pure traffic numbers.

I’m hoping that by publishing the stats, we’ll encourage the communities to think about how they can get people to feel more involved with their wiki and to decrease the “participation inequality” that Jakob Nielsen talks about. Ways that he suggests to do that are making it easier to contribute, making participation a side effect, letting users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities, rewarding participants for contributing, and promoting quality contributors. Now to figure out how to apply these ideas to 2000 very different wikis…

6 Comments

  1. I am Jack's username said,

    January 30, 2007 at 15:14

    If any experiments are made to “reward[…] participants for contributing”, it could be tested on both a popular and lurker wiki, but only with acceptance of the vast majority of editors. Messageboard-like ratings is probably a good 1st test.

  2. Lurker (Has always been by blog-post-name) said,

    January 30, 2007 at 19:23

    Well, one of the best ways to not negatively impact participation is to have as few barriers to editing as is reasonable, EG. Don’t require registration unless absolutely necessary. Having to register to post a message on a talk page (Prime vector for getting people involved) will alienate HUGE numbers of people. Don’t over-protect pages; for unregistered uninvolveds, semiprotection is as bad as full protection. Etc, etc…

  3. Me said,

    February 3, 2007 at 21:32

    How do you keep from people posting garbage?

  4. Wikimetrics » Participation in Wiki communities said,

    February 11, 2007 at 12:52

    […] Angela publised some stats from November 2006 on page views of non-logged in users compared to anonymous users for wikis at Wikia. The sample size is rather small on some wikis but in general (how explained by the other Jakob) 90% of page views were from users who were not logged. In spite of this not very innovative information (it’s always a power law!) the differences are interesting: In some wikis 70% of page views were from logged in users, in others only 1%. […]

  5. Spankart said,

    February 22, 2007 at 10:04

    I wouldn’t use the term ‘lurkers’ to refer to people who are visiting a wiki and reading it without creating an account and becoming active contributors. I would simply call them ‘readers’ (as opposed to ‘editors’).

    A ‘lurker’ is an unwanted person. A ‘reader’ is highly wanted - that’s an important difference. I think my wiki’s high percentage (99%) of not-logged-in users shows that we are doing a very good job of writing articles that interest many readers. It’s our sign of success, not an indicator that we’re doing a poor job.

    It depends on what you see as a wiki’s main goals.

    True, “converting readers into editors” is also highly desirable, and every wiki encourages its visitors to contribute their knowledge. But we shouldn’t look down on people who just come in and read our articles, because that’s exactly what we are writing these articles for. We strive to create free content for the world, not only for our own small community.

    Wikis aren’t forums, chatrooms or similar places where visitors are *expected* to either actively contribute or get out. Wikis *allow* anyone to contribute. The login and edit buttons are a feature, not an obligation. If visitors want to become actively involved, let’s give them a warm welcome. If they prefer not to, we should still respect and be happy to have them - they are our audience, what more can an author wish for?

  6. Angela Beesley said,

    February 22, 2007 at 13:03

    I agree with you about the term “lurkers”. I was using that since I wanted to draw similarities with Nielsen’s report, but of course in a wiki, readers are valuable and I didn’t mean to disparage them by saying they were lurkers.