2 new studies bring us some very interesting and basic information about Wikipedia:
Wikipedia coverage and conflict has been quantified:
* Culture and the arts: 30% * People and self: 15% * Geography and places: 14% * Society and social sciences: 12% * History and events: 11% * Natural and physical sciences: 9% * Technology and applied sciences: 4% * Religion and belief systems: 2% * Health and fitness: 2% * Mathematics and logic: 1% * Philosophy and thinking: 1%
What's intriguing is the that "philosophy" and "religion" have generated 28% of the conflicts each. This is despite the fact that they were only 1% and 2%. I am somewhat surprised (based on my personal experiences in articles I edit) that there is much less conflict in the areas of "society and social sciences" (7%), "history and events" (6%) and "geography" (merger 2%). It would appear that the Gdanzig issue is really just an exception, not the rule, and that conflicts based on nationalism and ethnicity are much less important then those based on religion and philosophy. Globalization, anyone? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-20/Wikiped... http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2009/04/mapping-contents-in-wikipedia.html
Preliminary results from the General User Survey of 2008 are available:
The results posted last week are selected from some of the questions. For instance, the preliminary results found that only 12.8% of contributors are female, and the average age for contributors is 26.8 years. Nearly 20% of contributors claimed either a Masters or PhD degree. Among those who did not contribute to Wikipedia, 25.3% said it was because they did not know how. Finally, the question results released addressed donations to the Wikimedia Foundation; 42% of respondents who didn't donate said it was because "I don't know how to do that", while 19.7% said it was because they didn't know Wikipedia was a non-profit. 33.6% of these responses were from the English Wikipedia, with the next 33% of responses split between the Spanish and German Wikipedias.
What I personally found quite interesting, in addition to the (expected but still not fully understood) great disproportion in terms of gender among contributors, was the low rate of responders from Poland (around ~15 place, and only tenth as much as those from Germany) when compared to the fact that Polish Wikipedia is the 4th largest, and population of Poland is only half of that of Germany. The researchers are somewhat surprised at the rates of response from various countries themselves; they have for example excluded the responses from Russian Wikipedia, which were the second most numerous group (Russian Wikipeda is the 10th most largest). My current guess is that how the survey was advertised by local Wikipedias and their Wikimedia chapters will prove to be a crucial factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-20/News_an... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/a7/Wikipedia_General_Surv...
On Monday 20 April 2009, Piotr Konieczny wrote:
Nearly 20% of contributors claimed either a Masters or PhD degree.
You are including "other" in this gloss, not sure if that's appropriate. Here's my summary:
Preliminary results of 130,576 cases with respect to: gender (12.83% female); age (25.8 years average; 22 years median); education (28.89% undergraduate; 11.85% Masters; 3.10% PhD); donation (42.03% don't know how; 19.73% didn't know it was a nonprofit; 18.80% donate time instead of money); contributions (62.5% pure readers; 24.5% contributors, 1% administrators); country, partner (30%), children (14%), hours (4.3 on average), motivation to contribute (like the idea of sharing, wanted to fix an error, ...), reasons for not contributing (51.98% don't have enough information to contribute, 48.53% happy just reading Wikipedia), factors that would increase contribution (42.23% help with identifying areas that need input, 32.95% some form of feedback showing how contributions help).
The one finding I found of particular interest: 32.95% noted they would be more likely to contribute if "It was clear to me that other people would benefit from my efforts". This leads me to a puzzle I've wondered about: is have someone tweak/add to your contribution -- rather than delete it -- a sign of being of use, or of being incompetent, as claimed by one of the earlier studies of Wikipedia motivation (Zhang and Zhu, 2006). Z&Z claimed "adding new content to an article decreases article creator's incentive more than deleting content" in accordance with the "perceived competence" theory: if someone changes something that you did you feel incompetent. Intuitively, I always found this odd as I'd think additions to one's new article is indication that people found it useful in some way. However,two things I never understood about Z&Z are: (a) "we expect our contribution to decrease over time" and (b) "excluding interaction variables" in models (5/6) give them opposite effects. How do they account for a natural decline in article creation, I don't know what the interaction variables are, did they mean independent variables?
Joseph Reagle wrote:
The one finding I found of particular interest: 32.95% noted they would be more likely to contribute if "It was clear to me that other people would benefit from my efforts". This leads me to a puzzle I've wondered about: is have someone tweak/add to your contribution -- rather than delete it -- a sign of being of use, or of being incompetent
[snip]
First thought: if a person has not contributed to Wikipedia, they can hardly be discouraged by the fact that somebody else edits their work, right? That said, the given reasons for non-contribution are certainly missing a major one: "because I don't want others to be able to change my work". That, of course, can have at least two explanations: first, indeed, because "that would mean my work was not valued" (I wonder what policy to cite here - "Wikipedia's article are eternal drafts and it should be expected that even the best work will be improved by others") and second "because I don't think anybody else is competent enough to change my work/I should be consulted if somebody wants to change MY work" (WP:OWN?).
Second thought: Seeing as respondents were allowed to select more then one answer, I wonder how the "It was clear to me that other people would benefit from my efforts" answer is correlated to "I knew there were specific topic areas that needed my help" and "I was confident my contributions would be valued and kept". I wonder if those three are really significantly different? In my experience, a lot of people answers along the lines of "but there is nothing I know that would be worth sharing with others" (or, simply "but I know nothing useful to share!"), which encompasses the three reasons above...
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