"Thank you to all who have contributed in this great work"

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Wikimedia Foundation sites are the fifth most popular web property. So when we conducted our Readers Survey, we expected to hear from our readers that they valued Wikipedia as a reliable source of online information. But we were still pleasantly surprised to see the overwhelming positive feedback from readers mixed with a deep appreciation of Wikipedia and its community for the existence of the free and easily available online encyclopedia that offers a wide breadth of content. As expressed by some of the more than 2000 readers who took the opportunity to leave a free-form comment at the end of the survey: “love the site” “blessing” “thank you for existing and “you can find everything in Wikipedia.” Praise for Wikipedia was a common thread among many readers. “It is great.” “It is a living organism – constantly evolving.”
 

Tag cloud of open ended response from Wikipedia Readers Survey
Word cloud of open ended responses from the Wikipedia Readers Survey

 
The real credit for building Wikipedia goes to the thousands of editors who volunteer hours every month editing Wikipedia, and as one reader from Egypt put it: “thank you to all who have contributed in this great work.” Readers who had never edited, but were aware that volunteers wrote Wikipedia articles acknowledged that they were embarrassed that they had never edited Wikipedia.
Although readers from all age groups read Wikipedia, with the average reader being 36 years old, Wikipedia remains an important tool for school students. “Great for school work,” said one. Acknowledging the role of Wikipedia as the first stop for information for school work, a reader in India said: “I wish I had Internet and Wikipedia when I was in school in the 70s.  My grades would have sky rocketed.” Parents also acknowledged using Wikipedia for helping children with their school work.
Some readers took the opportunity to point out features that they believe can be improved on Wikipedia, like search, the ability to improve the reading experience through customizable fonts and more audio and visual content to facilitate understanding of complex topics. We heard similar needs from users when we conducted user experience research in India, Brazil and the US. We have improved search functionality on the mobile site, and other features to improve the reading experience are on the product roadmap.
To our surprise (this was the first time participants thanked us for providing them the opportunity to participate in a survey), many readers told us that they loved participating in the study since it helped them expand their knowledge about Wikipedia (e.g. learning about features that they had not been aware of, or about WMF’s non-profit status). “From today, I will certainly be using Wikipedia more, excellent survey, it made me understand things I have been missing,” said a reader from the UK.
 
Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research
Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development
We recently conducted an online survey of Wikipedia readers, limited to 250 participants each in 16 countries. This is the last in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.

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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First, BIG thank you for Wikipedia you did a great favor for humanity, specially in 3rd world countries (like here in Egypt) where buying books costs much.
I want to volunteer in working in Wikipedia even in translating to Arabic contents, that would be great!
Blesses,
Bola

Wikipedia is my first port of call (before cross referencing) when I want learn about something.
Thankyou 🙂

In the darkness of ignorance one should light a lamp for showing the others the path and he is you.
The middle age is not a past era but is whenever there is no information and the man who writes makes renaissance and you are the one
Regards

Hey thank you everyone at wiki and for everyone at home sharing your knowledge with the world this is deffinetely the no.1 first stop for winning bets with friends lol but on a serious note much appreciated great work everyone!

Thank you , Wikipedia

Retweeted

aww, I didn’t get to do the survey, oh well, I would have said all sorts of nice things, like my Anthro professor said the reason we went from Horse and Buggy to Man on the Moon in less than 100 years is due to greater population and greater population densitiy leading to greater communications, thus now with the internet, in just a couple of years, in just a couple of seconds, its already happening at http://www.archure.net and Wikipedia too!

I love Wikipedia!!!

internet without wikipedia is like earth without water.
thank you.

Wikipedia is not just a portal , it is part of millions of people’s daily life . It
has served as the beacon of knowledge for many who can not access it otherwise . Special thanks to those volunteers who provided their contribution towards this noble cause .
God Bless Wikipedia

I am learning a lot from Wikipedia. It is the 1st choice for me whenever i want to learn something. And this is one of the best site in the Internet. Thank you so much….

Wikipedia is a great source of information and the pages are usually very well-written and very informative. Thanks to the Wikimedia foundation and to the editors for their time and effort ! However, as a reader I think it’s good practice to look at and verify the citations from time to time.

Just Because Of Wikipedia , Getting My Engineering Done Is A Piece Of Cake … Hats Off To WIKIPEDIA ..

Wikipedia ………The might of free knowledge
By the real meaning of the word “THANK YOU”