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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org Date: Fri, Jan 18, 2019, 4:15 PM Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Why the world reads Wikipedia: beyond English To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>

Hi all,

As some of you know, we started a line of research back in 2016 to understand Wikipedia readers better. We published the first taxonomy of Wikipedia readers and we studied and characterized the reader types in English Wikipedia [1]. During the past 1+ year, we focused on learning about the potential differences of Wikipedia readers across languages based on the taxonomy built in [1]. We've learned a lot, and today we're sharing what we learnt with you.

Some pointers: * Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474 * Data: https://figshare.com/articles/Why_the_World_Reads_Wikipedia/7579937/1 * (under continuous improvement) Research page on meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... * Research showcase presentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018 * A series of presentations to WMF teams and community: Look for tasks under https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201699 with title "Present the results of WtWRW" for link to slides and more info when available. * We will send out a blog post about it hopefully soon. A blog post about the intermediate results is at https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/03/15/why-the-world-reads-wikipedia/

In a nutshell: * We ran the taxonomy of Wikipedia readers in 14 languages and measured the prevalence of Wikipedia use-cases and characterized Wikipedia readers in these languages. * While we observe similarities in terms of the prevalence of the use cases as well as the way we can characterize readers, we can see that Wikipedia languages lend themselves to different distributions of readership and characteristics. In many cases, the one-size-fit-all solutions may simply not work for readers. * Intrinsic learning remains as the number one motivation for people to come to Wikipedia in the majority of the languages, followed by media. * In-depth reading and the reading of scientific oriented topics is highly and negatively correlated with the socio-economic status and Human Development Index of countries the readers in these languages are coming from. Long articles that may seem just too long for the bulk of our audience in US, Japan, and the Netherlands is in high demand in India, Bolivia, Argentina, Panamá, México, … * ...

This research was not possible without the extensive contributions by our formal collaborators: Florian Lemmerich (RWTH Aachen University) and Bob West (EPFL). On the WMF end, I was fortunate to work with Diego Saez on this project as well as more recently, Isaac Johnson. And all those in the Reading Web and Legal team who supported us throughout the process. I also want to underline the amazing work that the volunteers in the languages in the study did to support us heavily to learn more about their languages, not only through help with communications within their communities but also with the translation task which was not an easy one as they were asked to offer their time not only to translate but also do in-person meetings with us for us to make sure the intent of the question is translated the same way across the languages. Usernames Strainu, Tgr, Amire80, Awossink, Antanana, Lyzzy, Shangkuanlc, Whym, Kaganer, عباد_ديرانية, Satdeep_Gill, Racso, Hasive: Thank you!

Next we are going to extend this study to include demographics information. More information about it coming out in the next few weeks. (And I will send out a separate email to wikimedia-l about this topic and future research over the weekend. I need some time to finalize the message to make the message most useful for that audience.:)

Best, Leila

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05379

-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist, Lead Wikimedia Foundation

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