I expect that any site with as many active editors as English Wikipedia should have good statistical data about members - age, sex, race, nationality, and income distributions, among other things. Where can I find these statistics for English Wikipedia? I expect the Foundation has at some point retained an independent polling firm to obtain this data, right?
- Carl
On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:24 PM, Carl Beckhorn cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm wrote:
I expect that any site with as many active editors as English Wikipedia should have good statistical data about members - age, sex, race, nationality, and income distributions, among other things. Where can I find these statistics for English Wikipedia? I expect the Foundation has at some point retained an independent polling firm to obtain this data, right?
- Carl
Soon. The Foundation is planning a global survey of contributors and readers[0], set to be released to the public soon. (It is currently being translated.[1])
[0]http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/UNU_survey_agreement [1]http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_Survey_Translation
2008/7/25 Carl Beckhorn cbeckhorn@fastmail.fm:
I expect that any site with as many active editors as English Wikipedia should have good statistical data about members - age, sex, race, nationality, and income distributions, among other things. Where can I find these statistics for English Wikipedia? I expect the Foundation has at some point retained an independent polling firm to obtain this data, right?
- Carl
Why? Consider:
1)Many Wikipedians value their privacy very highly
2)There are a number of wikipedians who would view lying about their demographic data to be a way to gain an advantage in an editing conflict.
We have some idea about our readership from various people who tract browsing habits and we can make educated guesses about the demographics of our regular editors by looking at samples of userpages but that is about it.