[CITASA] 2 important studies about Wikipedia

[Piotr Konieczny]

2 new studies bring us some very interesting and basic information about 
Wikipedia:

Wikipedia coverage and conflict has been quantified:

     * Culture and the arts: 30%
     * People and self: 15%
     * Geography and places: 14%
     * Society and social sciences: 12%
     * History and events: 11%
     * Natural and physical sciences: 9%
     * Technology and applied sciences: 4%
     * Religion and belief systems: 2%
     * Health and fitness: 2%
     * Mathematics and logic: 1%
     * Philosophy and thinking: 1%

What's intriguing is the that "philosophy" and "religion" have generated 
28% of the conflicts each. This is despite the fact that they were only 
1% and 2%. I am somewhat surprised (based on my personal experiences in 
articles I edit) that there is much less conflict in the areas of 
"society and social sciences" (7%), "history and events" (6%) and 
"geography" (merger 2%). It would appear that the Gdanzig issue is 
really just an exception, not the rule, and that conflicts based on 
nationalism and ethnicity are much less important then those based on 
religion and philosophy. Globalization, anyone? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-20/Wikipedia_by_numbers
http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2009/04/mapping-contents-in-wikipedia.html

Preliminary results from the General User Survey of 2008 are available:

The results posted last week are selected from some of the questions. 
For instance, the preliminary results found that only 12.8% of 
contributors are female, and the average age for contributors is 26.8 
years. Nearly 20% of contributors claimed either a Masters or PhD 
degree. Among those who did not contribute to Wikipedia, 25.3% said it 
was because they did not know how. Finally, the question results 
released addressed donations to the Wikimedia Foundation; 42% of 
respondents who didn't donate said it was because "I don't know how to 
do that", while 19.7% said it was because they didn't know Wikipedia was 
a non-profit. 33.6% of these responses were from the English Wikipedia, 
with the next 33% of responses split between the Spanish and German 
Wikipedias.

What I personally found quite interesting, in addition to the (expected 
but still not fully understood) great disproportion in terms of gender 
among contributors, was the low rate of responders from Poland (around 
~15 place, and only tenth as much as those from Germany) when compared 
to the fact that Polish Wikipedia is the 4th largest, and population of 
Poland is only half of that of Germany. The researchers are somewhat 
surprised at the rates of response from various countries themselves; 
they have for example excluded the responses from Russian Wikipedia, 
which were the second most numerous group (Russian Wikipeda is the 10th 
most largest). My current guess is that how the survey was advertised by 
local Wikipedias and their Wikimedia chapters will prove to be a crucial 
factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-20/News_and_notes#Preliminary%20results%20from%20the%20UNU%20merit%20survey
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/a/a7/Wikipedia_General_Survey-Overview_0.3.9.pdf

-- 
Piotr Konieczny

"The problem about Wikipedia is, that it just works in reality, not in 
theory."