This is an area I am interested in also. I run two groups of Mexican students who work with Wiki project for their "servicio social," a community service requirement for all Mexican undergrads. There was some question this semester as to whether the program should continue as they were looking for evidence of "social impact"... which they were defining as students having direct contact with beneficiares (think reading to children or serving food at a soup kitchen). We did convince the powers-that-be that while there may not be face-to-face, we can provide numbers as to how many people access the materials that students create/improve (but cannot break it down as to how many of those are from Mexico).

________________________________ From: Wiki-research-l wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 7:23:17 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Request: Studies of external impacts of Wikipedia

I have a few thoughts.

Thinking financially here: while I'm not aware of studies, the rise of Wikipedia coincided with the demise of Encarta. Also, I think that you'd want to take into consideration the impacts that Wikipedia has had via its appearance in Google search results and in Google's information summary panels; I'm sure that Google has reaped substantial financial benefits from Wikipedia. (This is a mixed blessing.) You might consider making an estimate of how many millions of dollars university and school libraries have saved by not purchasing proprietary encyclopedias.

You might consult with WikiProject Medicine and WPMF to learn about the public health impacts of their efforts in content development and translation efforts, which they seem to think have been substantial in the developing world.

I believe that the education folks in WMF and WEF have done some analyses of how Wikipedia assignments have may have yielded improved student engagement with material than traditional course assignments.

There are probably also financial benefits that others have reaped from using open source MediaWiki software. Perhaps the folks in WMF Tech would be able to provide some analysis of the benefits of MediaWiki to external organizations.

HTH,

Pine

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 2:19 PM, Aaron Halfaker <ahalfaker@wikimedia.orgmailto:ahalfaker@wikimedia.org> wrote: Wikipedia has probably had some substantial external impacts. Are there any studies quantifying them? Maybe increased scientific literacy? Or maybe GDP rises with access to Wikipedia?

Are there any studies that have explored how Wikipedia has affected economic or social issues?

I'm looking for any references you've got.

-Aaron

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Following up on Fabian's suggestions, I put together a lit review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Student_use_of_free_online_information_resources/Related_work last year of the use of Wikipedia by a few different populations (focusing on students), which includes the Head and Eisenberg paper.

- J

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 5:01 AM, Flöck, Fabian Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org wrote:

I do not know of directly measured social or economical impact, but there are at least some indicators of the dependency on Wikipedia as a free information source for modern societies and professions, maybe that helps:

    • A. Head and M. Eisenberg. How college students use the web to

conduct everyday life research. First Monday, 16(4), 2011. ISSN 13960466. URL http://firstmonday.org/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/3484. For decision making: “...turning to search engines and Wikipedia almost as much as they did to friends and family” • K.-S. Kim, E. Yoo-Lee, and S.-C. Joanna Sin. Social media as information source: Undergraduates’ use and evaluation behavior. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 48(1):1–3, 2011. • J. Beck. Doctors’ #1 source for healthcare information: Wikipedia. The Atlantic, 2014. URL http://www.theatlantic.com/ health/archive/2014/03/doctors%2D1%2Dsource%2Dfor% 2Dhealthcare%2Dinformation%2Dwikipedia/284206/.

General population:

"As of May 2010, 53% of American internet users look for information on Wikipedia, up from 36% of internet users the first time we asked about Wikipedia usage in February 2007". (http://www.pewinternet.org/ 2011/01/13/wikipedia-past-and-present/ ; sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a newer version of that poll available)

42% used Wikipedia at least once a week in 2016 in Germany: http://www.ard-zdf-onlinestudie.de/index.php?id=559 (n=1508 German speakers, representative for the German population) and it has been increasing quite steadily from 2007 (20%) until 2013 (32%) http://www.ard-zdf-onlinestudie.de/fileadmin/Onlinestudie/PDF/Eimeren_ Frees.pdf , page 7 (“zumindest einmal wöchentlich”), for “at least sometimes” it’s up to around 70%

Best,

Fabian

...

On 24.01.2017, at 23:19, Aaron Halfaker ahalfaker@wikimedia.org wrote:

Wikipedia has probably had some substantial external impacts. Are there

any studies quantifying them? Maybe increased scientific literacy? Or maybe GDP rises with access to Wikipedia?

...

Are there any studies that have explored how Wikipedia has affected

economic or social issues?

...

I'm looking for any references you've got.

-Aaron _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Gruß, Fabian

— Dr. Fabian Flöck Researcher Computational Social Science department GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208 fabian.floeck@gesis.org

www.gesis.org www.facebook.com/gesis.org

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