Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-11008902-20141226235147/@comment-3076045-20150116193258

I'm going to add my thoughts here, since I was kinda the one that introduced it in the first place :p

It is basically what people have already said - its a way to get newbies to get involved on the wiki.

It's a small thing, sure, but we've found that when you get that little notification on the side when you make your first edit to a page, then you're more likely to want to come back and edit again, since you've got "something" for it.

As with a lot of wikis out there - we get a very large number of people who come to the site for information, and of those, very few become editors (anon or otherwise).

This is not a bad thing of itself - wikipedia's ratio is less than 1% for people who edit vs those who read the pages.

(Comparatively, we get around 1.2 million daily page views, and ~300 edits).

I would finally like to just add, since I'm the only one old enough here to actually remember a time BEFORE these came out - other attempts were tried to try and encourage newbies, but as soon as we introduced this, we got a lot more regular editors. It's basically THE thing that helped us become what we are today.