---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: 2009/3/3 Subject: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hello all,

as some of you may have seen, I've run a small survey over the weekend, scattered via a 5% site-notice on the English Wikipedia for signed in users. The result is a self-selected sample of authors. I'll publish the full anonymous raw data later this week, and I also intend to run it on the German Wikipedia to get some comparative data. Please note that I'll probably turn off the English version before doing so, so if you feel you still want to take the survey yourself, you can do so at: http://survey.wikimedia.org/index.php?sid=69514

We have 570 complete responses so far, of which only 1.23% have stated that they do not edit. On a 5 point scale where 5 represents multiple hours of editing per week 45.79% have answered 5, 18.60% have answered 4, 19.12% have answered 3, and 13.33% have answered 2.

The key piece of data is that 80.89% of respondents have answered as their first option that either no credit is needed (12.11%), credit can be given to the community (27.37%), credit can be given by linking to the article (30.18%), or by linking to the version history (11.23%).

Most frequently ranked last is no credit (45.79%) and a full list of authors (33.51%). Many people also left choice comments regarding the notion of a full list of authors. Most frequently ranked second-to-last is "link online, full list of authors offline". Only 4.38% ranked "link to the article" last or second-to-last.

IMO these results demonstrate a fairly strong and shared understanding in the community of the tension between freedom to re-use and author credit, while also showing that a simple solution, such as credit by linking in all cases, would probably be acceptable to the largest number of contributors. However, I'll leave further interpretation of the results for later. Part of the reason that I want to run the survey in the German Wikipedia is that I anticipate we might see significantly different opinions there, due to a historically stronger emphasis on author credit. But we'll see. :-)

More soon, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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