Report written by: Morten Warncke-Wang, with Ryan Kaldari and Danny Horn
The Autoconfirmed article creation trial (also known as "ACTRIAL") is a six-month trial that ran on the English Wikipedia from September 14, 2017 to March 14, 2018. During the trial, article creation was limited to users with autoconfirmed status (at least ten edits and at least four days since registration). Studying the first two months of the trial, our findings are:
- No apparent effect on new user activity levels and retention.
- A shift in content creation from the article namespace to the Draft namespace, with a subsequent shift in review workload from New Pages Patrol to Articles for Creation. This shift leads to the latter reviewing process struggling to keep up with an increasing backlog of review requests.
- There is a reduction in unencyclopedic content being created in the article namespace.
We expand on these findings and provide key questions for follow-up discussions both amongst members of the English Wikipedia community as well as the Wikimedia Foundation.
For a more detailed analysis and breakdown, please see Research:Autoconfirmed article creation trial.