Hi,
Joachim Schroer wrote:
some of you might remember our survey of contributors to Wikipedia last year. First of all, thanks to everyone who participated in the survey! Taking both the German and the international surveys together, we have a total sample of N=525 contributors, which would have been impossible without support from so many people. Thank you!
Although I'm still knee-deep in analyzing the data, we already have a good idea what keeps people motivated once they are involved in the project.
Will you publish the raw data after finishing the paper?
We also see a characteristic pattern in the reasons to join the project, but we could make an even stronger point if we had a suitable reference group to compare contributors and non-contributors. The best reference group I can think of would be Wikipedia users. Ideally, the best and cleanest way to get that sample is to publish the link on Wikipedia itself (e.g. on every 10'000th page or so). Do you see any chance to make that happen?
It's not possible on server side because of caching but you could write some JavaScript code that randomly shows a message (to anonymous users only?). There are some geeks in the German Wikipedia that should know how to write such JavaScript magic:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:BLueFiSH.as/Javascripts_%26_Stylesheet...
The code will be activated if you convice the Community of Admins to add it to
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Monobook.js&redirect...
Of course, we can also include additional questions in the survey that might be useful for the project.
In which languages do you want to do the survey? I'm very interested but a little but disappointed because your results are not published yet. How about an open survey where the raw data is published and everybody can analyse it?
Thanks a lot in advance for your ideas, and best wishes from Würzburg,
Greetings, Jakob