*First Post : Good News: Indians most willing to donate to Wikipedia*
http://www.firstpost.com/tech/good-news-indians-most-willing-to-donate-to-w…
/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(a)wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes
only. The publisher ( First Post) of the above news article owns the
copyrights of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
