A few updates from the last few months:
* The surveys successfully ran for one week. We were able to gather 63,000 responses across the 13 languages. I presented preliminary results about this at Wikimania in August and have now added the high-level results to Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh...
* More data will be added to the results there as we can validate it. Specifically, I am hoping to publish country-specific results where we have sufficient responses as well as data regarding the cross-tabulation of various questions from the survey and aspects of reader sessions.
* We are currently running a longer survey with lower sampling rates to test if we are able to reach less-frequent readers of Wikipedia and whether this changes any of our results. When we have analyzed this information, we will update the results to indicate whether anything changes.
Best, Isaac
On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 4:17 AM Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
An update on this thread:
- We have launched the survey on 2019-06-26 in 15 languages and we
intend to stop the surveys 7 days after launch time. The current flow of responses is as expected.
- The participating languages are: ar, de, en (sampling from all
countries), en (sampling from countries in Africa), es, fa, fr (sampling from all countries), fr (sampling from countries in Africa), he, hu, no, ro, ru, uk, zh. (A big thank you to the volunteers in these language communities who worked with us to make the translations and announcements on village pumps happen.)
- Please watch
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Beh... if you're interested to receive updates about the research as we go through the analysis. (Please expect, roughly, a monthly update frequency. If we can do more frequently, we will.)
- If you want the survey to run in your language community, there is a
chance that we run the same survey in a few weeks time in a few of more languages. You can express your interest by adding a line item as the last row of the table in
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reade... . Priority is given to languages who have signed up prior to this announcement. We can't guarantee that we can run these extra surveys.
And one logistical announcement: As some of you know, Isaac Johnson from the Research team is working heavily on this stage of the research (demographics+motivation/needs). As a result, some or all of the future announcements about this stage of the research may come from him instead of me. :)
Best, Leila
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 11:07 PM David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
Peter, all of these would be useful . The most useful of all would be a list of those that have been deleted as drafts that were not improved
for 6
months--I havre a partial list, but there is no easy way of screening
it. A
spreadsheet with links to the deleted versions and to the google scholar and worldcat records would be an enormous help--I became an admin 12
years
ago specifically to rescue deleted articles, but there is no systematic
way
of finding them.
On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 1:33 AM Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
David, Would your work be influenced by an analysis of the academic
biographies
which are most searched for that are not on Wikipedia yet? (assuming
that
such an targeted analysis was available) Cheers, Peter
PS. An analysis that included a check of whether the topic was likely
to
be notable and a listing of possible sources would also save a lot of wasted effort. Also a check against articles that have been deleted for good reasons, and articles in other languages with a reasonable
accessible
reference list.
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Goodman Sent: 12 March 2019 07:15 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] How diverse are your readers?
"with popular topics cannibalizing resources."
What resources can be cannibalized? The limiting resource in WP is interested people writing, improving, and validating articles. People choose their own topics. This is different from an organization where staff can be directed to work on what the management think is
important.
I, for example, almost totally avoid most aspects of what is popular culture--I am neither competent nor interested. ) The topics I work on
are
those that interest me, mainly academic biographies. I'm sure most
people
do not think them important. We're volunteers, and must tolerate each others interests.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 5:06 PM John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com
wrote:
We should be using a grid for what people are reading about, instead of using countries. That will give a better representation of large countries vs small countries. It will also better reflect local
ethnic
groups.
On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 1:53 PM Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
בתאריך יום א׳, 10 במרץ 2019 ב-23:27 מאת Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>:
Hoi, I have been thinking about it.. There is a place for research but
really
why can we not have the data that allows us to seek out what
people
are
actually looking for and do not find.. Why can we not promote
what
proves
to be of interest [1] ?
Actually, there was some work done around it. Here are some
examples:
- The Discovery (Search) team in the Foundation researched
searches in
Wikimedia sites' search box that yielded zero results. This was
done in
2016 or so, led by Dan Garry as the product manager, and this lead
to
some
improvements in the functionality of Wikimedia sites' internal
search
engine, although I don't remember what they were exactly.
- Google's Project Tiger provided lists of articles for which
people
often
search in the Google search engine in India, and about which there
are
no
articles in Wikipedias in languages of India. See
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Progra...
- Last year I made a list of articles that people search for in
their
language using the interlanguage links search box and cannot find.
You
can
see a sample here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Amire80/WEIRD/2018-04-09%E2%80%932018-04-...
. I plan to make this list nicer-looking and auto-updating some
time
soon.
- The GapFinder project is another tool that helps people find
articles
that are missing in some wikis:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GapFinder
- This is just an idea, but it's written down, which is a bit
better
than
nothing: Show the most popular articles by country in the PageViews
tool,
rather than just by language. It's documented at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T207171 . The rationale for
this is
that
the most popular English Wikipedia articles in the U.S., Nigeria,
India,
the Philippines, and South Africa are significantly different. The
English
Wikipedia is the most popular one in all these countries, but
whereas
it
is
sensible that it's popular in the U.S., it's a bit depressing that
it's
also the most popular in the other four countries, even though
languages
other than English are spoken there. The reason for this situation
is,
of
course, that there is little content in the Wikipedias in the
languages
of
these countries, and knowing what the most popular articles are can
help
people who write in these languages choose how to write that will
be
useful, and will hopefully raise the popularity of Wikipedias in
these
languages. The same is true for the most popular Russian Wikipedia
articles
in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, the most popular French Wikipedia
articles
in
Benin and Mali, etc. This is only an idea, but maybe it will be
implemented
some day.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
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