Launching the Second Annual Wikipedia Editor Survey

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On Thursday, December 8th, the Wikimedia Foundation will launch its second semi-annual survey (2011) of Wikipedia editors.  In order to capture editor trends, we are using the same methodology as the April 2011 Editor Survey – editors logged in to Wikipedia will receive a notification, as every editor is eligible to participate. To ensure that all editors have an equal probability of participating in the survey, all logged-in users will see the invitation only once. We’ll do a soft launch on Thursday (all Wikipedias, excluding English) and switch it on for the English Wikipedia next week, to accommodate the Harvard/Sciences Po survey that is launching soon on the English Wikipedia. We urge all Wikipedia editors to give us their feedback and participate in the survey. For more information, you can read the FAQ we’ve posted detailing the survey.
The survey is currently available in various languages in addition to English, including: Chinese (traditional, Hong Kong), Chinese (simplified), Arabic, Catalan, German, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Russian and Serbo-Croatian. The Foundation will conduct the survey in languages for which translations are available, and for the remainder of Wikipedia language projects the survey will be available in English.  The survey will take about 15 minutes to complete.  Since we are interested in trending the data, about 90% of the questions are the same as in the April 2011 survey. We have added a few new questions based on findings from Wikipedia Summer of Research project and other research work that has been conducted at the Foundation.
The current survey covers the following topics:

  • Demographics
  • Brief section on editors’ technology usage
  • Editing activities and contributions
  • Editor interactions
  • Opinions of editors about chapters, the Foundation and participation in board elections.

We’re looking forward to participation from editors all around the world while the survey is active. Please spread the word, and we would like to thank you in advance for taking the time to contribute your views!
Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

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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Since we are making some last minute fixes to Japanese, Catalan and Serbio-Croatian, the survey in these three languages, along with English, will go live on Monday.

“To ensure that all editors have an equal probability of participating in the survey, all logged-in users will see the invitation only once.”
I disagree with the tactic. To ensure that lots of Wikipedians answer the survey, you should deploy the banner for a long time, like two or three weeks, and let users see it all the time until they do the survey or disable the banner. I believe that’s the better way to catch less frequent users.

Hi, I’ve just completed the survey and towards the end, this question came up: What is your Gender? – Male – Female – Transsexual – Transgender There’s possibly a cultural divide going on, but to someone in the UK that question is rather offensive – Transsexual/Transgender is not itself a Gender and if you’re collecting stats based on that it will under-report the number of Trans folk. A better set of answers would be something like: What Gender do you identify as? – Male – Female – Other/Would rather not say Do you regard yourself as Transsexual/Transgendered? – Yes –… Read more »

Thanks – I just filled out the survey – nice job! But I had one moment of frustration. You *required* that I fill in three answers for this question: “Below, we list some problems that have been identified with Wikimedia culture. Please pick the THREE most important problems that have affected you personally, making it harder for you to edit.” I couldn’t continue without finding three to agree with. But I didn’t agree with more than two, and found that I think many of them are good things, not bad things, or never applied to me. So you forced me… Read more »