Research:Wikipedia Editors Survey 2011

Contact

Mani Pande

Wikimedia Foundation

This page documents a completed research project.

See also: strategy:Editor survey, strategy:Editor survey FAQ, strategy:Editor survey feedback.

The Wikipedia’s Editors Survey 2011 is a survey being conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia and its sister projects. The Global Development Department is running this 50 question, 18 minute long survey to better understand the Wikipedia editing community.

Purpose and results

This new survey will answer a few key questions:

What is the demographic profile of contributors? (age, gender, education, employment, nationality, languages, basic readership and funding information)
What other activities do users pursue online?
What activities do they perform on Wikimedia projects? What is their editing history?
What have been their interactions with other community members and how has it affected their motivation/contribution patterns?
Have they perceived discrimination and what have been its effects?

This survey will also allow us to refresh our data, get more accurate, reliable, and valid sample data, determine influences on Wikipedia activities, understand editing activities, and find ways to improve retention and increase diversity.

The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to respecting the privacy of our users. We will not share any individually identifiable data with any outside organizations and will not use the data in any way that is not associated with the objectives of this survey. However, anonymized results will be released into the public domain. Volunteers and other interested users will be free to use this data and demographic statistics for their own analyses as well.

Translation

As this is a global survey of all Wikipedias, we would like to have it translated into as many languages as possible so that many people can participate. If you are interested in helping with this, please see the Translation subpage for tips and for the translation workspace.

We will be advertising the survey via CentralNotice, so we would appreciate if you would translate that too.

Questions

If you have any questions about this survey, or concerns about confidentiality, please feel free to contact Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research, at mpande wikimedia.org; post messages on the talk page; or leave feedback at strategy:Editor survey feedback.

Results

We have blogged about the results from the editor survey. If you are interested, you can read the blog posts about the editor survey at our Wikimedia blog. Here is the link to the topline data from the Editor survey.

The Editor Survey Report is available as a Meta Wiki or a downloadable PDF.

The raw data from the survey can be downloaded from here.

A few important notes about the dataset: 1. This dataset includes data from the Editor Survey conducted in Japan. The analysis conducted for the Report does not include Japan, since we received the results much later. 2. After some cleaning (details in Appendix C) we have 5,281 responses. A few of respondents either reported zero edits (in question D1b) or their actual edit counts were found to be zero. Their responses to several questions were ignored, and only the "true editors" (edit count greater than zero) were considered. You can find out for which questions we looked at only true editors in Appendix C of the report.