Report for Editor Survey, April 2011

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Blog readers and the wider Wiki community alike have waited patiently for both the final report and raw data from the editor survey conducted in April. We have good news: it’s finally here.
This post links to the landing page for the final report on Meta, which is available on meta wiki itself and as a downloadable PDF. In addition, raw, anonymized data in a CSV format is available on data dumps for download and further analysis.  We have also provided a codebook and documentation to aid in analysis.
The report covers the following research areas:

  • Editing Activities: What drives editors to edit Wikipedia? What are the different types of editing activities? How do the editors assess the different tools available to them?
  • Demographics: What is the educational background of editors? What is the gender and age distribution of editors? What are the differences and similarities among different groups of editors?
  • Women editors: What are the experiences of women editors? Do women editors have different experiences compared to male editors? Can women editors be segmented into different groups?
  • Editing community: What kinds of interactions do editors have with each other? What kinds of interactions are conducive to editing and what are deterrents to future editing?
  • Location and Language:Where do editors live? How many language Wikipedias do editors edit? Which language Wikipedia gets the maximum attention?
  • Technology and Networking: What kinds of technological devices do editors own or have access to? What devices do they use for editing and reading Wikipedia? Do editors use social media tools? How?
  • Foundation, chapters and board: What is the assessment of the foundation, its chapters, and the Wikimedia movement? Do editors participate in board elections?
We are really excited about sharing the raw data from the survey and urge the community and other researchers to conduct further analysis using the data files. Our report is a first cut at analysis, and we are hopeful that other researchers will conduct more analysis to answer some of the following questions: how does geography impact contributions? Are there differences based on tenure? What can be done to attract more editors to Wikipedia?

Such insights take time to develop, but we can assure you the results are worth the wait.
Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research
(This is the tenth in series of blog posts where we previously shared insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey.)

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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#3316

“Each user saw a link to the survey only once. This ensured that all users (editors) had an equal probability of participating in the survey, and the survey was not biased towards those editors who edit more frequently.”
I disagree with that. If Alice logs every 12 hours and Bob logs every 12 days, Alice is more likely to find the link than Bob. Also, since each user can vote only once, then a much longer period than 7 days and a permanent banner would catch more users.

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