First Post : Good News: Indians most willing to donate to
Wikipedia
http://www.firstpost.com/tech/good-news-indians-most-willing-to-donate-to-wikipedia-204429.html
Wikipedia recently concluded its annual fundraiser, which was
quite successful with the online encyclopedia collecting nearly
$20mn dollars which will be used for the daily operations of the
site. Jimmy Wales, founder of the site had appealed passionately
to all users to donate to help keep the site free from
advertisement. More recently the Wikipedia blackout to protest
SOPA/PIPA was seen as a strong anti-censorship stand taken by the
website, for which it was widely supported by readers and users
alike. (We chronicled how readers/users of the web survived that
day!)
Post the donation drive, Wikipedia has just published results from
a readers survey as a way of understanding the major donors to the
site. Some of the facts that come out from the survey are rather
surprising.
For once Indians are number ONE, when it comes to a desire to
donate to Wikipedia. According to the survey 42 percent of Wiki
readers from India were ready to donate, followed by Egypt and US
where nearly 33 percent users were keen to donate. The survey also
noted that users from Germany, France and Japan were less prone to
making a donation.
However a constant a problem that many users said prevented them
from donating was the lack of affordability. Ayush Khanna, Data
Analyst, Global Development at the Wikimedia foundation wrote in a
detailed blogpost that
The high value of the dollar may also have an effect, with 68
percent of Japanese readers and 57 percent of Indian readers
citing affordability as a reason. However, about 60 percent of UK
readers also cite this reason.
While dollar rates could be a possible issue for not donating,
Indian users who don’t possess a credit card were probably stumped
on how to go about donating to the website.
But perhaps the biggest shocker is that nearly half of Wikipedia
users are not aware that it’s a non-profit organisation. The
number is quite high with 47 percent of readers being blissfully
unaware of this crucial fact. Being non-profit has helped
Wikipedia remained ad-free since it began 2001. Russia (64
percent), Brazil (56 percent) and the United States (56 percent)
were countries where this lack of knowledge was woefully high. The
fact the US figures on this list too is quite interesting, since
the US also had a sufficient majority of readers who were willing
to donate to the site.
What was even more bizarre, according to the survey numbers, was
that nearly 28 percent of its users who had edited pages on
Wikipedia were unaware that it was a non-profit organisation.
Wikipedia has been putting out quite some information from this
survey for nearly a month now on the Wikimedia global blog. Other
key facts are that only 6 percent of its users have ever edited a
Wikipedia page and most of the users are happy to just read the
content.
Many felt that they didn’t have the grasp of a particular subject
to actually edit a page (Around 28 percent felt that they didn’t
have enough info). Six percent of the users also felt that they
were afraid their edits would be removed. The survey also
confirmed that Wikipedia is still being edited by very few people
and a lot of people are hesitant to make edits. In an earlier
survey the site had stated that
80 percent of our editors are from the Global North. In most
other countries, a very small number of respondents as percent of
total sample say that they had edited Wikipedia.
Once again it seems that the editors for Wikipedia are still
largely based in the developed countries, despite Wikipedia
launching pages in several languages other than English.
Expectedly men are far more likely to edit pages than women on
Wikipedia, for there are more men online than women. The number of
young readers who edit is also increasing.
The study was conducted during the summer of 2011. A 15-minute
survey was administered to a total sample of 4,000 participants
within the following 16 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada,
Egypt, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland,
Russia, Spain, South Africa, UK, and United States. To read about
all the blogposts on Wikipedia survey click here
Regards
Tinu Cherian
press@wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
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