Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the fall 2011 term. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign students to contribute to Wikipedia, usually in the form of expanding a stub article, in place of a traditional research paper grade. At the end of the fall 2011 term, we asked students who participated in the U.S. and Canada program to fill out a survey on their experiences. A total of 132 students took the survey, with a little over three-quarters of the respondents from the United States. About 61 percent of the respondents were enrolled in undergraduate courses, while the remainder were enrolled in graduate courses.

Learning outcomes

A series of questions were designed around assessing student learning outcomes. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. Students from the United States and graduate students all reported higher beliefs in the benefits of a Wikipedia assignment. More than half of the respondents felt that doing a Wikipedia assignment improved (1) their ability to identify poor quality Wikipedia articles and (2) their ability to identify bias in documents. In addition, more than half the respondents felt their ability to write a neutral (i.e., balanced point-­of-­view) document improved through a Wikipedia assignment more than through a standard term paper.

These findings indicate that students recognize the media literacy benefits in doing a Wikipedia assignment. As professors have noted, when Wikipedia is not the destination of the student’s research on a topic, but is instead the road, students are forced out of their research comfort zone. Students are required to evaluate the reliability of sources, find journal articles, and write from a neutral point of view to meet Wikipedia’s policy requirements.

Support resources

Student participants use a set of resources when they have questions about editing Wikipedia — online text, Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and professors to name a few. Online text is the most commonly used resource, followed by printed materials. Nearly 93 percent of students who consulted their Campus Ambassador found him or her to be helpful, and 74 percent of students who consulted an Online Ambassador said he or she was helpful.

We’ve found that having that support makes a big difference to students. Students can chat with their Campus Ambassadors in person on campus or on wiki, and they can interact with Online Ambassadors on-wiki and through an IRC chatroom where they can get immediate help for quick questions.

Students had a positive interaction with the Wikipedia community of editors when they interacted with them. Students were asked to pick two adjectives to describe their views of the Wikipedia editing community; top responses included “helpful” (72 percent), “collaborative” (39 percent), and “intelligent” (27 percent).

Motivations

We asked students to identify the key motivations for their contributions to Wikipedia. Important factors students reported were getting a grade, interest in their Wikipedia article topic, and the usefulness of their work (i.e., it wasn’t another throwaway assignment). Graduate students reported a broader variety of motivations, when compared to undergraduates. In particular, more than 60 percent of the graduate students gave a high ranking to the fact that their work contributes to a freely accessible knowledge base.

Final comments and looking ahead

Although converting students into longterm editors is not an explicit goal of the Wikipedia Education Program, as many as 46 percent of our respondents expressed interest in continuing to edit Wikipedia.

When students were asked to share the hardest thing about their Wikipedia editing experience, some common themes emerged. Many students mentioned the challenges of learning how Wikipedia works, and how editing an article was a lot more work than they imagined. Almost universally, they talked about how hard it was to learn wiki syntax. The Visual Editor will help alleviate many of these concerns.

To sum up, here’s what one student had to say when asked about any memorable experiences:

“Overall, a great learning experience. Having to really validate anything you say by backing it with a reputable source is incredibly beneficial and students should be exposed to this, especially if they have not had a research methods course in their undergraduate career.”

Ayush Khanna
Data Analyst, Global Development

A team of researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Sciences Po Paris, led by Professor Yann Algan and Wikimania 2011 keynote speaker Professor Yochai Benkler, invites English Wikipedia contributors to participate in an interactive online experiment on decision making. The goal of this study is to better understand the dynamics of interactions and behavior in online social spaces. The project has been reviewed by the Wikimedia Research Committee and extensively discussed on the English Wikipedia Administrators’ noticeboard. The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to support this project which we believe will help advance research on our community.

Starting today, logged-in eligible editors will receive an invitation to participate in this study via a CentralNotice banner. To reduce banner overload, the invitation banner has been coded so as to be displayed only to a sample of English Wikipedia contributors meeting eligibility conditions for this study. If you are among the editors selected for this study, please consider participating. If you disable the banner, it will not be displayed to you anymore.

The survey takes about 25 minutes to complete. It combines a series of interactive experiments on decision making with questions about attitudes and practices. Based on their decisions and those of other participants in the study, participants will earn money that they can then choose to donate to the International Committee of the Red Cross or the Wikimedia Foundation if they so wish.

The data collected by this study is subject to European privacy protection protocols and will be used for research purposes only. All research outputs and data, while preserving full anonymity of participants, will be made available under an open access license. The research team will present its findings at a Wikimania conference.

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy

“Our brains and our behavior are driven by feedback loops. Harness their power and change your life,” points out Wired magazine in its latest cover story on how feedback can be used to change human behavior. Similarly, data from the Wikipedia Editor Survey, April 2011, shows that feedback from other editors – especially positive feedback – encourages more editing. According to the survey, Wikipedia editors reported that positive interactions and experiences with others made them more likely to edit Wikipedia, and, as a direct corollary, negative interactions and experiences made them less likely to edit Wikipedia.

The majority of editors pointed out that positive interactions (having grammatical errors fixed by another editor, receiving compliments and barnstars from fellow editors, and experiencing “their” article make it to front page) made them more likely to edit Wikipedia.

Percent who believe that following interactions make them more likely to edit

While positive interactions create positive feedback loops that encourage editing, negative interactions reduce the likelihood of editing. These interactions include the perception of being looked down upon by other editors, as well as seeing edits reverted without any explanation.

Percent who believe that following interactions make them less likely to edit

Fortunately for our community, every listed action leading to a negative feedback loop is an easy fix: treat other editors with respect and encourage their growth as a contributor, and every negative trend we see here could literally disappear. So please, Wikipedia editors, continue doing the good work and providing positive feedback to your fellow editors. The successful growth of our project depends on it.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the fourth in series of blog posts where we will share insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey)

In February, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a survey with support from the Public Library of Science to explore the attitudes and beliefs of the open access scientific community with regard to Wikipedia. The open access movement is dedicated to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge. PLoS and other open access journals publish scientific papers under permissive Creative Commons licenses that allow anyone to download and re-use content. The Wikipedia article about open access, which itself could use some improvement, goes into more detail.

At Wikimedia, we’ve been thinking for a while about ways to directly work with scientists and open access journals. While scientists already contribute to Wikipedia in a self-organized manner (an example being the Gene Wiki effort), we have never made a systematic, large-scale effort to invite them to participate. Our exploratory survey indicates that such an invitation would be welcomed with open arms.

The survey was published on the PLoS website, blog, newsletter and Twitter feed, and the link to the survey was also more widely circulated, most notably in Peter Suber’s open access newsletter. 1,743 self-selected respondents completed the survey. Out of the respondents, 225 identified as PLoS authors. The subsample of authors did not differ remarkably from the general response. In general, respondents expressed a very favorable (58.98%) and somewhat favorable (32.19%) opinion of Wikipedia, and 87.73% indicated they used Wikipedia frequently or occasionally as part of their professional work.

71.03% of respondents supported some form of hyperlinks from open access publications to Wikipedia, and 91.51% supported links from Wikipedia to open access publications. 67.93% of respondents indicated support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, and 24.73% indicated support for limited experiments. 81.82% responded they would participate in such an effort to improve Wikipedia, with roughly half of the respondents indicating they would only do so as part of their professional work.

While the survey is by no means scientific (in spite of the subject of study, it wasn’t intended to be), it indicates that efforts to reach out to more scientists as potential contributors to Wikipedia would be met with enthusiasm and support, particularly in the open access scholarly community. We’ve had some initial conversations specifically with the Public Library of Science, and are looking forward to continuing them, specifically with an eye to scalable approaches to future collaboration.

More information:

• Overview report of survey results (PDF)
• Raw, anonynomous data from the survey (OpenDocument format)

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

From late October to early November 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit conducted the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors in 20 languages. In total, more than 130,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors completed the extensive survey questionnaire (out of more than 300,000 people total who took at least part of the questionnaire).* This level of response far exceeded our expectations, and the data that was collected provides a wealth of information about the Wikipedia community. English, German and Spanish were the most responsive Wikipedia editions and together make up two thirds of the responses.

The UNU-Merit team has spent the previous months cleaning and preparing the data, and is now making available first results for some of our priority questions. Key outcomes of this first analysis include:

• 65% of respondents self-described as readers, and 35% as (mostly occasional) contributors. Former contributors are analysed separately.
• Respondents came from over 200 countries, ranging from 10 to 85 years completed the survey; their average age is 26 years, and 25% of the respondents are younger than 18 years. Female respondents are a bit younger than the average (24 years)
• Among these, readers and contributors are on average in their mid-twenties, and predominantly male (75%)
• Women, with a share of 25% in all respondents, are more strongly represented among readers (32%) and less strongly represented among contributors (13%).
• Both educational levels and age are slightly higher among contributors than among readers.
• Regarding their motivations to contribute, respondents mentioned as their top two reasons that (1) they liked the idea of sharing knowledge, and (2) that they had come across an error and wanted to fix it.
• The concern that they might not have enough information to contribute is the main reason holding back potential contributors, mentioned by 51% of this group. Fourty-eight percent mentioned they were happy readers of Wikipedia, and saw no reason to get involved as contributors.
• The most common reason why respondents have not donated money to the Wikimedia Foundation, mentioned by more than 42% of respondents, is that they don’t know how. (If you happen to be one of them, we suggest you go to donate.wikipedia.org ;-) )

Ruediger Glott and Philipp Schmidt from UNU-Merit have made available additional data in the online workbook of their analysis (PDF file), and we’re planning to give you regular updates with new data every couple of weeks from now on. The survey team also maintains its own website at wikipediastudy.org.

This is a landmark moment in the history of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. These and future findings that will result from this data will help to shape our efforts to reach new contributors and new readers.  The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank everyone who has made this survey possible, especially the UNU-Merit Team and the community of translators.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

* In addition to the 130,000 responses overall, we’ve received 40,000 responses from the Russian Wikipedia, which very significantly overrepresents this group in the total response set. The survey team has excluded this group from the data until the possible causes for this overrepresentation can be fully understood.

[UPDATE 4/16] Naoko Komura, who project-managed the survey translation and launch on the Wikimedia Foundation side, sent a list of translators who helped us to run this survey in 20 languages. They are: Jeandré du Toit, Mohamed Magdy, Meno25, Toni Pulido, Jordi Roqué Figuls, Xavier SMP, Zirland, MF-Warburg, Tim Landscheidt, Michael Bimmler, Arno Lagrange, Ariel T. Glenn, Ziko van Dijk, Verónica Rivero, Salvador Espada, Sébastien Beyou, Plyd, Delphine Ménard, Philippe Verdy, Daniel U. Thibault, Maximilian Hasler, Rex Alberto, Morris Mastini, Federico Leva, Hatukanezumi, Henrdrik Maryns, Robin P., Wojciech Pędzich, McMonster, Jennifer Hobbs, Thomas Buckup, Aleksandr Sigachov, Ilya Haykinson, Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai, BalaSundaraRaman, C.R. Selvakumar, Manop Kaewmoracharoen, Nguyễn Thanh Quang, Trần Vĩnh Tân, Ting Chen, Andrew Leung. Thanks to all of them for their help — it’s wonderful to have so much volunteer support in a project like this. Thanks also to Naoko herself, who helped to create the Japanese translation, and to the UNU-Merit webmasters, Herman Pijpers and Mourik Jan Heupink. :-)<

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.

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In July 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with UNU-Merit, plans to launch the first general survey of Wikimedia readers and contributors (with a focus on Wikipedia). This survey will ask questions on:

• demographics (gender, profession, etc.)
• factors which influence whether people contribute or not
• topic and activity areas of interest for readers and contributors
• awareness of Wikipedia sister projects and the Wikimedia Foundation

The more languages we can present this survey in, the better! It will give us invaluable information about who our audience and our contributors are to different language Wikimedia projects, allowing for comparisons across languages and cultures. The anonymized data from this survey will be freely licensed.

If you speak and write languages other than English fluently, please help us to translate the survey. :-)

Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation<