Hi all,
We are ready to share the result of the first part of the study for the 14 languages that participated in the survey with you. To recap: the goal of the first part of the study was to compute the prevalence of the use-cases of Wikipedia across the 14 languages, basically, generating plots similar to Figure 2 in our earlier research [0] for these languages. What took most of our time was the debiasing step we had to take for every language and triple-checking the results to make sure we didn't make a mistake. You can read more about this first part at the blog post we just published [1] and on meta [2].
What's left? A lot! :) We took one big step to make sense of the data, but there is a lot left. We have now entered the second phase of the study during which we will try to do a deeper analysis to characterize readers by survey response type across as many languages as we can. The higher the number of survey responses from a language, the higher the chances for us to be able to get good results in this phase. We expect to be able to do this deeper analysis in around 5 languages, maybe more. We will let you know once we know more about this part.
This is a good opportunity for me to thank many of you who have made this research possible. Many colleagues at Wikimedia Foundation stepped up and helped us in every step of the way, thanks to all of you. I specifically want to call out the work that the points of contacts and volunteers put to help us run the survey in your languages [3] and to our formal collaborators Bob West (EPFL, User:Cervisiarius) and Florian Lemmerich (RWTH Aachen University, User:Flemmerich) who have been working in this area of research, truly tirelessly. Florian had a lot of sleepless nights to prepare these results.
If you have questions or comments, you know where to find us: IRC channel #wikimedia-research on freenode (look for leila or lzia), the discussion page where we document things, etc. Your role is key now. Please look at the results in your languages, ponder on them, and tell us if you see interesting patterns that we have missed and we should consider digging deeper in and making sense of. And, please enjoy using this data for your language. We stand behind these results [4].
Best, Leila
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05379.pdf [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/15/why-the-world-reads-wikipedia/ [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh...
On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 12:28 AM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
OK, I did it :)
I don't write in the Russian Wikipedia as much as I do in Hebrew and English, but it should be OK.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-06-21 9:57 GMT+03:00 Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org:
On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 7:03 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
If I want this done for Hebrew and Russian, do I just reply to this
thread?
[Amir, you are aware of this but I'm hoping by saying it here we can change the outcome.]
At the moment, all text is translated to Russian but we don't have any volunteer as a point of contact for Russian Wikipedia. The PoC is needed to communicate the notifications from us to the ruwiki community and also transfer anything we should know from that community back to us. I have made having a PoC a (soft?) requirement for running the survey in a language. If you are from ruwiki and you'd like to be the PoC, please ping me immediately (I expect up to 3 hours of your time to be spent in the next 2 months).
If we don't find a PoC in the next 12 hours or so, we will need to make a call whether to run in ruwiki or not. I'd love for us to run the survey in ruwiki, especially as volunteers have already spent time and care on the translations and there is little we (the broader Wikimedia community) know about ruwiki. :)
Here is the list of languages and their PoCs, if you're curious: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_ Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour/Robustness_across_languages# Participating_languages
Best, Leila
בתאריך 21 באפר׳ 2017 19:46, "Leila Zia" leila@wikimedia.org כתב:
Hi all,
==Background== In November 2016, I presented the result of a joint research that helped us understand English Wikipedia readers better. (Presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIaMuWA84bY ). I talked about how we used English, Persian, and Spanish Wikipedia readers' inputs to build a taxonomy of Wikipedia use-cases along several dimensions, capturing users’ motivations to visit Wikipedia, the depth of knowledge they are seeking, and their knowledge of the topic of interest prior to visiting Wikipedia. I also talked about the results of the study we did to quantify the prevalence of these use-cases via a large-scale user survey conducted on English Wikipedia. In that study, we also matched survey responses to the respondents’ digital traces in Wikipedia’s server logs which enabled us in discovering behavioral patterns associated with specific use-cases. You can read the full study at https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05379 .
==What do we want to do now?== There are quite a few directions this research can continue on, and the most immediate one is to understand whether the results that we observe (in English Wikipeida) is robust across languages/cultures. For this, we are going to repeat the study, but this time in more languages. Here are the languages on our list: Arabic, Dutch, English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish (thanks to all the volunteers who have been helping us translating all survey related documents to these languages.:)
==What about your language?== If your language is not one of the six languages above and you'd like to learn about the readers of Wikipedia in it (in the specific ways described above), please get back to me by Monday, April 24, AoE. I cannot guarantee that we can run the study in your language, however, I guarantee that we will give it a good try if you're interested. The decision to include more languages will depend on: our capacity to do the analysis, the speed at which your community can help us translate the material to the language, the traffic to that language, a couple of sentences on how you'd think the result can help your community, and your willingness to help us document the results for your language at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_ Wikipedia_Reader_Behaviour (Quite some work will need to go to have readable/usable documentations available and we are too small to be able to guarantee that on our own for many languages.)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
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