Dear Wikipedia Researcher,

I am a doctoral student in Lehigh University’s Learning Science and Technology Ph.D. program. I invite you, as an expert in this area, to participate in my qualifying research project on collaboration within the Wikipedia environment.

My study is to examine the social and technical factors that have supported the creation and evolution of Wikipedia. In order to collect experts’ opinions, I am employing a research methodology called the “Delphi technique” (Linstone & Turoff, 1975), which derives consensus among a group of experts using a series of questionnaires and feedback.

Thus, participation in this study will involve responding to one or more online questionnaires. For more information about the method, please visit http://www.lehigh.edu/~xiz4/. If you are interested in participating in this research project, please take the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=gs8Gebnb3XwRGuOr8ZAeWw_3d_3d.

If you have more questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at xiz4@lehigh.edu. Thank you for your participation.

Sincerely, Xiaoli Zhao Doctoral Student, Learning Sciences and Technology Lehigh University xiz4@lehigh.edu

Dr. M.J. Bishop Associate Professor Lehigh University mj.bishop@lehigh.edu