[Foundation-l] Multilingual Wikipedia Survey Launched

[Erik Moeller]

Hello,

in collaboration with the the Collaborative Creativity Group at
UNU-MERIT (www.merit.unu.edu), we want to invite you to take the first
multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors. For the
first time, this survey will provide an overview of the Wikipedia
community and how the content of Wikipedia is created, used, and
perceived. We therefore encourage everyone to participate in this
survey and to fill in an online questionnaire that will be made
accessible to you in the coming two weeks. We have prepared survey
versions in more than 20 languages. In order to keep the traffic
manageable we have chosen a staggered approach for the surveys.

The survey is currently running in Dutch, Vietnamese, and Tamil, and
we have received more than 2500 complete responses already. (We can
track the responses by language, so we can choose to examine any
subset we want.)

The following language versions will be launched in the coming days:
Russian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Esperanto, Czech,
Japanese, Italian, Russian, Afrikaans, Indonesian, French, Thai,
Spanish, German, English, Chinese-simplified and Chinese-traditional.

The survey will be featured in the sitenotice of those languages.
We're currently using the local notices, but we may use the
CentralNotice system that is used for fundraising messages for the
coming languages, because it has some features which make it more
manageable for us.

I want to extend a BIG thank you to all the volunteers who have worked
on this survey, especially all the translators. We will compile
translation credits for the press release when the survey is
completed.  Thanks also to the UNU-Merit team (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,
Rüdiger Glott, Herman Pijpers, Jan Philipp Schmidt), and to Naoko
Komura, who has been project managing the survey since September.
And, thanks to all colleagues who have given feedback along the way.

We've tried to design questions that make sense. Please feel free to
send any and all feedback to <info(at)wikipediastudy(dot)org>.
Translations have been reviewed by multiple people, but if anything is
an obvious error, we will try to fix it. We will not be able to
address all feedback in this first run, but we will try to learn from
it for future surveys. This one won't be perfect, but it will tell us
lots of things we've never been able to talk about with any degree of
confidence.

Finally, a note on the coming analysis, and on privacy.

In terms of analysis, UNU-Merit will collect and analyze the data, and
publish analyses of the results, available under a Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-Alike License on a public website as well as in
established academic journals. Anonymized data will be published under
a CC-BY license for other researchers to study.

In terms of privacy, no personally identifiable information will be
released by UNU-Merit or the Wikimedia Foundation without permission
of the respondents. Personally identifiable data will also only be
retained for a year from closure of the survey, except for
participants who provide express permission to be included in a panel
for a follow-on survey.

I'm looking forward to seeing the first results, and I hope many of
you will take the survey. :-)
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate