Hi Audrey
As you have already seen there is lots of literature on contribution.
I have co-authored a study on Wikipedia English contributors'
motivations especially in regard to gender or what is often referred
to as the Wikipedia gender gap. We will present our study, including a
long interview with Sue Gardner, and over 50 interviews with
contributors about the topic at the ICA annual conference in Phoenix,
AZ at the end of May. In case you attend, our presentation is May 27:
http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ica/ica12/index.php?click_key=1&cmd=…
Best regards,
Stine Eckert
Stine Eckert
PhD Student
Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland | Knight
Hall 2100N
College Park, MD 20742 | USA
keckert(a)jmail.umd.edu
On Tuesday 03/04/2012 at 8:33 pm, Laura Hale wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Audrey Abeyta
> <audrey.abeyta(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hi Laura,
>>
>> Thank you for your feedback. You're absolutely correct: I should have
>> specified that currency is in US dollars (I have now specified the
>> currency in the question text). I do, however, have a question that
>> asks about the respondent's country of residence. The questions in
>> this questionnaire were adapted from Hars & Ou (2001), so I tried to
>> deviate from their structure as little as possible.
> I haven't read Hars & Ou. My research background is I probably best
> described as education, marketing and sociology based. (My
> dissertation topic is actually fundamentally about online research
> methods.)
>
> When Hars & Ou did their work in 2001, were they conducting research
> in online communities? And were they dealing in global populations?
>
> By not asking both language, country and metro area, by not allowing
> the expression of income in a local sense, you are creating a junk
> survey that will not be repeatable. If you look at the cost of living
> in Texas and compare it to Chicago, Illinois, there is a huge gulf.
> The cost of housing, of petrol, the local taxes, the cost of medical
> care, the local commodities in terms of food and clothing mean that
> $8,000 will go much, much further in Texas than they will in Chicago.
> In turn, the cost of living in Chicago will be cheap when compared to
> Sydney and Canberra. These will look a bit more reasonable when you
> compare the cost of living to say Tokyo or Moscow. $8,000 USD does
> not go very far in Chicago, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, Moscow when
> compared to Texas.
>
> I would STRONGLY urge you to either put in a question that asks
> country and metro area, and then correct for this by adjusting for
> cost of living when doing your final results. If you can't do that,
> I would STRONGLY urge you to remove the question because the data will
> be completely meaningless. (Minimum wage in my territory is $17.78
> USD.)
>
>>
>>
>>
>> Your concerns regarding the over/underrepresentation of certain
>> segments of the Wikipedia population are also well-founded. Because
>> respondents are volunteers, I am aware that there may be a large
>> sampling bias, which I will do my best to correct for during
>> statistical analysis. Additionally, I will acknowledge this limitation
>> in the discussion section of my thesis.
>
> How will you do sampling correction? I don't see a language
> connection for one. The survey just says "Wikipedia", not "English
> Wikipedia" so I assume you're talking about all Wikipedias. If not,
> you will want to consider that my own response included experiences
> with Simple Wikipedia. You asked time spent editing Wikipedia, but
> did not ask the type of work done on the site, nor the volume of edits
> done, nor the status on Wikipedia. how are you going to correct for
> an over representation of English Wikipedia contributors, female
> contributors, the admin core, and power contributors?
>
> This is hugely important. If you don't have questions for allowing
> for those connections, if you don't deliberately seek out minority
> responses but instead advertise to a select selecting population, your
> results will be fundamentally flawed and not repeatable. Given your
> research questions, I suspect if we both advertised this survey, we
> would get differences in answers that extremely different and
> STATISTICALLY significant.
>
> The research design here just looks very, very poor and like there is
> very little done to correct for groups that may have an incentive to
> contribute versus occasional contributors who have less of an
> incentive to contribute and complete your survey.
>
> --
> twitter: purplepopple
> blog: ozziesport.com
>
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>
Dear Wikipedia contributors,
Your valuable opinions are needed regarding users' motivations to contribute to Wikipedia. This topic is currently investigated by Audrey Abeyta, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. You can read a more detailed description of the project here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Motivations_to_Contribute_to_Wikipe…
Those willing to participate in this study will complete a brief online questionnaire, which is completely anonymous and will take approximately ten minutes. The questionnaire can be accessed here: https://us1.us.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_8ixU9RkozemzC4s.
If you have any questions or concerns about this study, please contact Audrey Abeyta at audrey.abeyta(a)gmail.com.
Thank you in advance for your participation!