Dear Wikipedia Researcher,

I am a doctoral student in Lehigh University’s Learning Science and Technology Ph.D. program. I am contacting you because you have been identified as part of the growing community of scholars who are researching aspects of Wikipedia. I am hoping you, as an expert in this area, might be willing to participate in my qualifying research project on collaboration within the Wikipedia environment.

My study is to examine the factors that support the creation and evolution of Wikipedia in an effort to describe why this “community of practice” (as defined by Lave and Wenger, 1991) has been so successful. In order to collect experts’ opinions about Wikipedia’s success, 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. In the first round, experts will answer one open-ended question related to Wikipedia’s success and an informational survey. This first round should take 15-20 minutes to complete. Based on your responses, you may be contacted to participate in the second and later round of questionnaires. In the second and later rounds, each expert will receive feedback about the results of the previous round, and will be asked to review, rate, and comment on the group’s previous responses. This process will be repeated until consensus among the experts has been achieved, typically in 3-4 rounds. All later questionnaires will include multiple-choice questions and should take less than 10 minutes to complete each. All responses and demographic information will be maintained in confidence and will be utilized for the sole purpose of this research.

If you are interested in participating in this research project, please visit the Website 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