Wikimedia Outreach: Account Creation Improvement Project →
Wikipedia’s sign up procedure is pretty complicated. Go to Facebook’s homepage and the signup procedure is exceptionally simple. The amount of text on the Wikipedia sign-up form is about 10 times higher than that on Facebook. Wikipedia’s sign up form has all sorts of scary warnings about policy and so on.
The Account Creation Improvement Project is something Wikimedia are trying to do about this: by doing surveys of why people sign up and trying to find ways to simplify, streamline and make a lot easier the process of signing up for a user account. Why bother? Well, you need a user account on Wikipedia in order to create new articles, to move pages and to not be pestered by CAPTCHAs. If you don’t have an account, you cannot edit semi-protected articles or articles that are part of the Pending Changes trial. Plus it’s harder to collaborate with people.
If you are a designer, a developer, copywriter, or a user experience expert, your help would be appreciated. In addition, the project will need to deal with making sure any solution is standards-based, accessible and translatable into other language editions of Wikipedia. Whatever your skills, there’s something to work on here.
