Based on the current discussion we're talking about at least two things here,
(1) The public perception on the 'editability' of Wikipedia
Regarding that I agree with Joseph that there are quite a few number of people whom never noticed that WP can be edited, not limiting to undergraduate students, but even some professors. I found this (heuristically) particularly pronounced among the less internet-savvy group. This leads to the second issue,
(2) A public perception survey
Agree with Andrea, it is currently quite impossible to do a representative research on WP. Hence it would be more worthwhile to perform target-group research. However, as we previously discussed in Frankfurt as well in Boston, we might somehow need to consider a centralized pool of research resources. Like what Joseph said, it is very hard to get users to respond to ad hoc research questionnaires - a lot of people just dismiss the yet another questionnaire on Wikipedia. If we ever pull together enough effort to start on some more structured and apparently (/cough cough) reputable research, and perhaps leave the research data available to researchers by request, it may significantly increase the quality of research on WP. Of course, the issue of privacy is touchy...
/headache
Andrea Forte wrote:
One approach to the problem of finding a representative sample of ALL Wikipedia readers *cough* is to perhaps target some smaller populations that you are interested in. If I were reviewing a paper, I would be quite skeptical of claims about "Wikipedia readers" because how people understand information, the Internet, and collaborative technologies is culturally constructed.
It seems more relevant anyhow to be able to say, for example, we think this is how middle-class secondary school students in the US and England are thinking about Wikipedia. Or this is how professional journalists in Germany are thinking about Wikipedia. More targeted sampling provides purchase for interpreting the results in a culturally relevant fashion.
Andrea
On 11/30/06, Joachim Schroer joachim.schroer@googlemail.com wrote:
Dear all,
2006/11/30, Mathias Schindler mathias.schindler@gmail.com:
and that the information provided might actually be incorrect. Therefore I am planning to do a questionnaire on the "Awareness of Wikipedia's Concept" (or something like that).
[...]
Any comments?
Sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results. It might be useful to see if the people answering the questionaire show any "Awareness of the concept of an encyclopedia" at all and the reality of traditional style encyclopedias at the market.
we included a number of these and related questions in our current (German) survey of Wikipedia readers/visitors [1, 2], although we do not ask about other encyclopedias. The survey is available here (thanks to Jakob Voss!):
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Leserumfrage
I'm afraid, however, that our own resources in recruiting a representative sample of readers are somewhat limited. Any help is greatly appreciated... ;-)
Best wishes from Wuerzburg,
Joachim
[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/123/ [2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.deutsch/17765/
-- Joachim Schroer, Dipl.-Psych. University of Wuerzburg Department of Psychology II, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Roentgenring 10 97070 Wuerzburg Germany
Phone: +49 931 31 6062 Fax: +49 931 31 6063 http://www.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/ao/staff/schroer.php schroer@psychologie.uni-wuerzurg.de _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l