[Wikimediaindia-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia-l] Why We Read Wikipedia in your language

This may interest some of you. A. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Leila Zia &lt;leila(a)wikimedia.org&gt; Date: Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 9:45 AM Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Why We Read Wikipedia in your language To: Wikimedia Mailing List &lt;wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; 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_Be… (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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>