Thank you, I will definitely keep you all updated.

I decided to ask people not to take administrative edits (what would be a better term to include all "maintenance") or grammatical corrections, but not to rule out anything else. Even if an edit is not a major one, I suppose it is interesting to know where the tiny bits of information originated. Sure the by far most interesting question at this stage relates to writing whole articles.

I supposed that if people are contributing on their profession related topics they are unlikely to do specific information seeking and/or they rely on their professional sources and especially experience. It is a separate issue from seeking or not, but I assume that it affects a whole lot the way information is sought. This is of course speculation at this point and I hope I can discuss this in more detail when I have the results in my hand.

best wishes and thank you for very good comments,

Isto

Isto, This sounds like really interested work, on a topic I am especially fascinated by :) Please do keep us up to date when you have some results or conclusions. I have two comments and a question after looking at the survey. 1) You might want to define "administrative edits" a bit better. I assume that you only want people to discuss substantial edits to an article's content, not minor edits, edits to project or user space, etc. 2) I don't understand how this question: "I never contribute to Wikipedia on my profession related topics" relates to information-seeking -- whether people contribute in areas related to their profession seems like a separate issue from whether they go looking for information or not. A question: would it be worthwhile asking where people looked for information? Printed books, other websites, newspapers, etc. "Information seeking" is very broad and vague and can encompass many behaviors. best, -- Phoebe On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Isto Huvila isto.huvila@abo.fi wrote:

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Dear All,

I am currently engaged in conducting research on Wikipedia users' information behaviour and especially the information sources and services used in contributions.

The purpose of this survey is to map information sources used in writing and editing Wikipedia articles. The survey is a part of the research project "Information service 2.0" conducted by myself (Department of Information Studies, ?bo Akademi University, Finland) as a part of the Academy of Finland research project "Library 2.0 - a new participatory context".

The individual answers will be processed strictly confidential, the data will not be handed over to any third parties or to non-academic use and all informants will remain strictly anynomous.

Survey URL http://survey-3.istohuvila.fi/index.php?sid=62924&lang=en

More information about the project may be found at http://www.istohuvila.fi/library-20 http://www.library2pointoh.fi

Best Regards,

Isto Huvila

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Ph.D., research fellow, lecturer Information Studies :: ?bo Akademi University (w) +358-2-2153467 (m) +358-40-5726259 (e) isto.huvila@abo.fi (w3) www.istohuvila.fi

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