Wikipedia:User survey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There is great demand for an optional User survey to be implemented across the Wiki[pm]edia projects. This would contain questions to help improve newbie and regular user experiences; to inform future tool and project development; to help connect users with subjects, groups, and other readers/editors to improve their contributions to and benefits from Wikipedia; and to help researchers understand the community composition and dynamics.
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[edit] Survey features
Features of such a survey:
- Separable. Key questions should be on an initial page; with subsequent pages of questions that might be less-frequently answered.
- Repeatable. Users should be able to retake the survey, particularly to complete sections or pages they had no time for at first
- Anonymizable. Survey takers should have the option to remain anonymous when taking the survey, guaranteed that their responses would only be passed on in aggregate form.
- Some may wish the option to be completely anonymous within the database, so that their survey input is not associated with their username. However, that might involve separating such non-repeatable, less-verifiable, more-anonymized results from the core results, and as a result might not be very useful to others...
- Updateable. Survey writers will regularly revise the survey; it should allow updates while also ensuring that a minimum # of survey-takers take an identical older version, when necessary.
[edit] Survey attempts
[edit] German Wikipedia survey
Findings:
- number of speakers of a given language is positivly correlated with number of articles in that language Wikipedia; however English is significantly underrepresented (extremly low number of articles per speaker). French speakers are the most activ (highest number of articles to number per speaker). image
- number of articles is positivly correlated with Gross Domestic Product image
- age: The average age is at approximately 30.8 years. The median is at 27 years. 62 per cent are between 15 and 32 years. Distribution flattens exponentially to at the higher age. The distribution is inclined to the right (there are more young wikipedians than old). image image
- gender: 88 % male; 10 % female; image, gender statistics are similar for the administators sample
- occupation:
not indicated 0.9 % Full time 42.5 % Part time 10.4 % Pupil 6.6 % Student 25.5 % no employer-employee relationship 4.7 % Other (e.g. retirement) 9.4 %
- education: image Low validity, seems to indicate a bias towards natural sciences?
- family
not indicated 4.7 % Single 50.9 % in firm partnership living 27.4 % marry 15.1 % divorced 1.9 %
Source and method: preeliminary results of University of Wuerzburg study (see WP:ACST; sample was 960) and others
[edit] Others
See, among others, User:Sj/Survey/draft, User:Alterego's survey, at least 5 academic surveys whose authors contacted sample editors via their individual user talk pages (see WP:ACST), and similar surveys in German, Japanese, and other language Wikipedias.
At Meta there is a project (meta:General User Survey) to create a Wikimedia Fundation wide survey; however the project has been stalled since 2005 due to lack of interest from developers (the theoretical side is mostly done, but there is nobody available to help with practical website implementation).
