More Prominent Edit Links

by Andrew on January 14, 2010

in MediaWiki, Site Updates

Just logging in a couple subtle changes to the MediaWiki installation that may encourage more visitors to edit articles. By highlighting the edit buttons and links, I suspect a higher percentage of visitors will be likely to contribute or edit content.

We’ll measure this against the previously established Goal Tracking in Google Analytics that tells us that 7.6% of visits result in an article edit.

Highlighted Edit Button

The traditional “edit” button on top of the content window now has a faint highlight:

Before: The Edit Button

Before

After: The Edit Button

After

To achieve this effect, I updated my theme’s main.css file to include this new entry:
#p-cactions #ca-edit a {
background-color: #ffcc99;
}

Highlighted and Moved Section Edit Links

Additionally, I moved the “Section Edit” links from the far right of each section header to just left of the h2 headline and applied the same faint highlight:

After: Section Edit Link

After

To accomplish this, comment out the float:right; in the existing .editsection entry in main.css and add a new entry for .mw-headline with a float:left; like this:
/* Edit section links */
.editsection {
/*float: right;*/
margin-left: 5px;
background-color: #ffcc99;
}
.mw-headline {
float: left;
}

{ 1 comment }

2009 Year in Review

January 13, 2010

2009 Visits by Month:
13,709 visits (64.5% of the site total) came from 168 cities within Virginia:
Editing Statistics
7.6% of visits “converted” by editing an article, resulting in 1,610 edits to articles.
0.4% of visits resulted in a new account creation, or 88 new accounts.
Top 50 Articles by Views:

Article
Page Views

/wiki/Tacky_Lights_Tours
8,385

/wiki/Main_Page
6,665

/wiki/List_of_Twitter_Users
2,446

/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
1,331

/wiki/Category:Bars_and_Restaurants
1,218

/wiki/Monument_Avenue_Easter_Parade
912

/wiki/Belle_Isle
890

/wiki/WWBT
861

/wiki/Category:Things_to_Do
855

/blog/
702

/wiki/Hashbrownnetworking
618

/wiki/Haunted_Houses
611

/wiki/Category:Blogs
555

/wiki/Maymont
532

/wiki/July_4th_Fireworks
509

/wiki/Category:Businesses
478

/wiki/Image:Tacky_lights.jpg
477

/blog/2009/04/spam-attack-reversed/
469

/wiki/Birthday_Deals
428

/wiki/Shockoe_Proposal
411

/wiki/Sledding
360

/wiki/J%27s_Notes
359

/wiki/Social_media_club
352

/wiki/Kanpai_Japanese_Steakhouse
350

/blog/2008/10/how-to-add-rel-nofollow-to-mediawiki-edit-links/
333

/wiki/Lewis_Ginter_Botanical_Garden
332

/wiki/Dwight_Jones
313

/wiki/Category:Arts_and_Culture
300

/wiki/Strawberry_Hill_Races
278

/wiki/Bryan_Norwood
274

/blog/2009/04/mediawiki-wysiwyg-coming-soon/
254

/wiki/Category:Neighborhoods
238

/wiki/Form:Business
230

/wiki/The_Checkout_Girl
217

/wiki/Special:SpecialPages
216

/wiki/Meade_Skelton
203

/wiki/Category:Nonprofits
175

/wiki/Help:Contents
157

/wiki/West_End
155

/wiki/Help:Starting_a_new_page
154

/wiki/Category:Community_Organizations
151

/wiki/Social_Media_Club
148

/wiki/RichmondWiki.org:About
147

/wiki/Main_Street_Java
142

/wiki/CenterStage_Foundation
134

/wiki/Category:People
133

/blog/2009/02/finally-an-xml-sitemap-generator-for-mediawiki/
126

/blog/2009/05/mediawik-import-xml-function/
117

/wiki/Carytown
116

/wiki/Sticky_Rice
110

Wiki Statistics (All Time)
There are 923 total pages in [...]

Read the full article →

Advice for New City Wikis

October 30, 2009

Update 11.10.09: CantonWiki.org has launched.
Through my affiliation with ArborWiki.org, I was approached by a guy that wants to start a city wiki for Canton, MI. He had some specific questions about starting a city wiki and building momentum. Here is my response, which I felt is appropriate for anybody wishing to start a wiki:
The RichmondWiki [...]

Read the full article →

Welcome Aboard, Piwik!

October 23, 2009

I just installed Piwik, an open source website analytics package. It is running alongside Google Analytics to give us another set of data to track the wiki’s performance and visit statistics.
Why, you might ask? Well, mainly just for fun. Google Analytics is great and provides the basis for our monthly Site Statistics posts. But since [...]

Read the full article →

September 2009 Site Stats

October 13, 2009

Visits to the wiki increased 20% over August and most of the other site usage metrics (pages per visit, time on site, etc.) improved as well. Additionally, 12.55% of visits resulted in a “goal conversion”. In our case, that means a new account setup, an edit made to an article, or a user login.
Most Viewed [...]

Read the full article →