Column 1
Individual authors64.65
Teams and groups3.88
Foundations and organisations11.89
Universities5.15
Companies14.44
The Wikipedia Survey
iSummit 08
Sapporo Convention Center
July 31, 2008
Philipp Schmidt, Rishab Ayer Ghosh
Ruediger Glott
United Nations University MERIT
http://ccg.merit.unu.edu
UNU MERIT
Collaborative Creativity Group
FLOSS
FLOSSPOLS
FLOSSWORLD
FLOSSINCLUDE
FLOSS
Where - FLOSS
Locations of Debian GNU/Linux leaders/maintainers
Who - FLOSS
FLOSS source code shares by author type
The academic community will gain a greater understanding of one
of the most fascinating experiments in peer production of
knowledge: In less than a decade, Wikipedia has become one of the
world's 10 largest websites, and the single most comprehensive
reference work in history, written entirely by volunteers. What
drives these people? Who are they? Why do they or do they not
contribute? Answers to these and other questions will give insights
that will likely also be applicable to other volunteer-driven
communities.
th gii ngy mt tt hn
To make the world a better place
etc ....
20+
3
FLOSS studies
Other research
&*
$
Who?Why?QualityHow?Gender
FormatsBarriersDonationsLanguagesWikimedia
Demographics, descriptive statistics
Motivations at the micro-level
Combine qualitative results with existing quantiative
studies.
Try to find out more about the different types of contributors
(zealots, samaritans, bourgeoisie, etc. and what drives their
behaviour)
Quality: Perception of quality, Wikipedians vs. casual users,
reasons for this perception (familiarity with the quality control
mechanisms?)
What are the processes through which quality is created /
ensured when everyone can contribute?
3 4
Open Access
Challenges
Size Alexa: 8th most popular site,~ 9% of users, 0.6% pageviews,
but how many users/ contributors?
Sampling anonymous readers and contributors, non-homogenous
community, high turn-over rates
Sharing / Open Access (privacy, userid)
Who and Why?
Basic demographics
80/20 - 95/5 95/95 :-) (Wales vs Swartz)
Rise of the Bourgeoisie Temporal shift of contribution patterns
(Kittur et al. 2007)
Zealots - Good Samaritans (Anthony et al. 2005)
EN: Edits 195M, 4000 editors (non bots) 32.82%
Active Wikipedians (5 edt/mth): delta -10% +20%
25% of edits by newbies (less than 1 mth)
Number of anonymous users
Qualitative differences in contributions
Survey: More information on types of edits (possible input to
modelling contributions)
Survey: Motivation for editing
Hypothesis: Power-law distribution of total edits, but content
production shifts into tail over time, because Samaritans only get
involved after sufficient amount of stubs exist
Who and Why?
Quality
Pagerank (Wilkinson)
No. of Revisions, Authors, Words ...
Peer-review (Nature, Wedemeyer 2008)
New concept and understanding of quality
Awareness of quality assurance processes
Diversity of expertise contributing (Page)
www.wikipediasurvey.org
August 2008
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