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 site-wide announcement banners of those languages.
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
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