Hello,
Some remarks:
"People in my field are not allowed to write about their original
research in Wikipedia" - I stumbled over this; one is not supposed to
write about OR in Wikipedia. This could be misunderstood.
"Wikipedia robots arbitrarily revert legitimate contributions" - do
bots really do that? And are people afraid of that? See also
"Wikipedia robots may arbitrarily revert my legitimate contributions"
"I don't see the purpose of contributing to Wikipedia" - this seems to
be too general to me, I would drop it
Kind regards
Ziko
2011/2/7 Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
Hi WSC,
thanks for the detailed feedback. Here's some background on what guided the
design of the survey:
Negatively phrased questions
All the questions were compiled based on actual input we collected during
the pilot. As outrageous as it may sound, editing Wikipedia as a potential
threat to one's career is an actual reason some participants reported and we
want to assess its importance as a potential barrier. If you google "tenure
blogging" you will get an idea of how hot the debate has been around the
question whether blogging is a risk or not for one's career (especially for
non-tenured faculty). Something similar may happen (or may have happened in
the past) for Wikipedia and we want to capture this i the survey.
Starting the section with...
The order of the questions in each block is randomised for each participant,
so it was just bad luck :)
Individual motivations vs shared perception
This is the most delicate issue of the survey, for which we considered
several alternate designs. We want to contrast the participants' perception
of Wikipedia participation in general with one's individual motivation to
contribute or not to contribute. The rationale for this is that we noticed
that participants often can dissociate their judgment on statements they
would endorse as members of a professional category ("editing Wikipedia does
not count towards improving one's CV") from judgments on what represents an
individual barrier to participation ("even if editing Wikipedia does not
improve my CV, this is not a reason for me not to contribute"). Phrasing
questions as regarding one's peers is a way to have a participant focus on
shared perception as opposed to individual motivation. The reason why we put
general questions upfront and individual-motivation questions at the end is
that we believe the noise added by framing questions "from general to
individual" is less important (for what we want to study) than if we ordered
them "from individual to general". To address this properly we should
randomise the order of the two blocks, not just the order of questions
within each block, that's something I can look into.
Dario
On 7 Feb 2011, at 19:00, WereSpielChequers wrote:
I appreciate that phrasing questions neutrally can be somewhat
difficult. But I think there are too many leading or negatively
phrased questions to produce useful information. Starting the section
with "Editing Wikipedia may damage one's scientific reputation" rather
sets an anti wikipedia tone.
Also I'd switch the sequence between individual and collective
perception. Putting the section about the individual before the
collective section would start with something that respondents should
more easily be able to answer - some people simply won't feel that
they can answer questions on behalf of people in their field if they
are unaware of those other people's views.
WereSpielChequers
On 7 February 2011 12:16, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
All,
the Expert Barrier survey is ready to run. We took into account most of the
suggestions we received during the pilot phase and we are planning to
release the survey by Wednesday morning London time, in time for the
Imperial College Recruitment Drive [1]. Here is a link to a live preview:
http://nitens.org/ls/?sid=21693
(some blocks of questions are hidden depending on how participants answer in
the first screen when asked whether they ever contributed to WP)
If you have a moment to give it a try, comments are welcome by Tuesday night
PST.
Best,
Dario, Giota and Daniel
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CONTRIB/Imperial
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