Wikipedia survey
Mar. 31st, 2006 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenI got an interesting email recently. It's from a researcher at Hong Kong City University, asking me about why I contribute to Wikipedia. I thought they were interesting questions & I found they led me to answer at some length.
If anyone reading this is also a Wikipedian, you might fancy getting in touch with this chap... Contact me & I'll pass on his details.
The Email
-----
I am writing to you to ask you about your objectives as a Wikipedia contributor.
My name is Mai Pattarawan. I am an academic at the City University of Hong Kong, researching Wikipedia. Specifically I am interested in the objectives and motivation of Wikipedians who take the time and make the effort to contribute.
I would like to ask you just three questions and hope you will be able to answer:
1. Why do you contribute to Wikipedia? Would you say it is a personal matter, where you enjoy the opportunity to reveal your knowledge on a subject, or a collaborative goal where you enjoy sharing knowledge with others?
2. In what ways do you find your contributing to Wikipedia beneficial? (E.g., satisfaction of building the world’s largest encyclopedia). Would you say these benefits (personal or for the entire community) are felt right away, or do you expect the benefits to arise as time goes by?
3. Do you expect that your contributing more to Wikipedia will lead to others to contribute more?
-----
My answers
1.
I think it’s a well-designed site for this in at least 2 ways. It lures you in to writing something, and for many people, once you’ve started, it’s almost addictive – it becomes a hobby or something and you just want to contribute more and more!
For me, I was talked into contributing by a couple of people I know in the “real world”, i.e., socially. The main one was a Wikipedian called David Gerard – he’s linked from my UserInfo page. He is also reddragdiva on the Livejournal blogging site – if you haven’t contacted him already, I think he’d be an interesting person for you to talk to.
The first thing that tempted me was a red link. If a Wikipedia article links to another article and the destination page is blank – i.e., that article hasn’t been written yet – it shows the link as being red. If you click it, it takes you to the nonexistent page and displays a message saying that “this article hasn’t been written yet. If you know anything about it, please write one!” (Or words to that effect.)
This is great bait. Whoever linked to the nonexistent article thought that it was an important enough subject that it needed an article, but they didn’t write it themselves. Perhaps they didn’t know enough, or hadn’t the time; who knows? But this is a very tempting prospect to a certain type of person – if you *do* know anything about the subject, the temptation to show off your erudition is strong.
But this leads to stage 2. At first, if you’re not very confident or something, you’ll only write a brief article. You might mark it as a stub, or someone else may come along later and do that. There are people who just monitor Wikipedia for new pages and give them a quick work-over when they appear.
A stub in itself is also a very tempting thing. If you find a stub on an area you know about, once you’ve gotten over your fear of getting in there and writing, it’s very tempting to add something to the stub. You just insert a line, maybe just a phrase, giving some information that you know.
And then later you check back. Often you’ll find someone else has added more, so you add more, or you edit what they’ve added, or change it if you think it’s wrong… And you’re off. It’s like the story of the Magic Stone that made Stone Soup – the inspiration behind the famous Fractint fractal graphics program. Look it up!
Once you’ve started, it’s fun and addictive. Now, I will generally just on the spot edit pages when I see mistakes. I write stubs just off the cuff if I know anything about the subject, maybe doing considerable research first if I’m not sure of my knowledge. I also sometimes sit down and write complete non-stub articles, if it’s something I’m confident I know about. I will happily leap in and start major changes on an article if I am confident.
I don’t get much involved in the Wikipedia community; I haven’t emblazoned my userinfo page with WP-specific banners and graphics, I don’t generally attend meets or anything, but I use the site almost daily and if I have time I roam around reading anything of interest and editing as I go. I find it fun, I enjoy sharing my knowledge, it pleases me when I see my changes accepted and used and my articles linked to from others and so on. I like writing; I am a rather didactic or pedagogical type of person, so I like lecturing; and I thrive on peer approval. So I find it interesting, fun and fulfilling.
2.
It’s growing better all the time. I find it a good feeling that I’m a small part of building it – I feel virtuous, that I’m doing something good. I already find WP an invaluable reference source and it is only getting better. I’m not fussed about size, but it’s good because it’s free, it’s instant, it’s online and it’s Free in the Free Software sense. (/Libre/ as well as /gratuit/, to resort to French, as English only has the 1 word “free” for 2 different concepts.) It’s not anyone’s property – it’s open to all. If I were aiding some profit-making company, I wouldn’t do it.
3.
I believe and hope so, yes. As WP gets bigger and deeper & more authoritative, there’s more reason to use it for reference, and the more people who use it, the more contribute to it. So I think it’s snowballing and hope that it will continue to do so for a long time to come. I imagine that this will not continue indefinitely; at some point, it will have got to the stage where most of the articles are already fairly definitive and there will be less and less to add. However, new discoveries, new things needing explanation and so on should make its growth fairly eternal – it’s just that it will, perhaps, asymptotically grow more and more slowly in decades to come. I hope it never stops altogether, though!
If anyone reading this is also a Wikipedian, you might fancy getting in touch with this chap... Contact me & I'll pass on his details.
The Email
-----
I am writing to you to ask you about your objectives as a Wikipedia contributor.
My name is Mai Pattarawan. I am an academic at the City University of Hong Kong, researching Wikipedia. Specifically I am interested in the objectives and motivation of Wikipedians who take the time and make the effort to contribute.
I would like to ask you just three questions and hope you will be able to answer:
1. Why do you contribute to Wikipedia? Would you say it is a personal matter, where you enjoy the opportunity to reveal your knowledge on a subject, or a collaborative goal where you enjoy sharing knowledge with others?
2. In what ways do you find your contributing to Wikipedia beneficial? (E.g., satisfaction of building the world’s largest encyclopedia). Would you say these benefits (personal or for the entire community) are felt right away, or do you expect the benefits to arise as time goes by?
3. Do you expect that your contributing more to Wikipedia will lead to others to contribute more?
-----
My answers
1.
I think it’s a well-designed site for this in at least 2 ways. It lures you in to writing something, and for many people, once you’ve started, it’s almost addictive – it becomes a hobby or something and you just want to contribute more and more!
For me, I was talked into contributing by a couple of people I know in the “real world”, i.e., socially. The main one was a Wikipedian called David Gerard – he’s linked from my UserInfo page. He is also reddragdiva on the Livejournal blogging site – if you haven’t contacted him already, I think he’d be an interesting person for you to talk to.
The first thing that tempted me was a red link. If a Wikipedia article links to another article and the destination page is blank – i.e., that article hasn’t been written yet – it shows the link as being red. If you click it, it takes you to the nonexistent page and displays a message saying that “this article hasn’t been written yet. If you know anything about it, please write one!” (Or words to that effect.)
This is great bait. Whoever linked to the nonexistent article thought that it was an important enough subject that it needed an article, but they didn’t write it themselves. Perhaps they didn’t know enough, or hadn’t the time; who knows? But this is a very tempting prospect to a certain type of person – if you *do* know anything about the subject, the temptation to show off your erudition is strong.
But this leads to stage 2. At first, if you’re not very confident or something, you’ll only write a brief article. You might mark it as a stub, or someone else may come along later and do that. There are people who just monitor Wikipedia for new pages and give them a quick work-over when they appear.
A stub in itself is also a very tempting thing. If you find a stub on an area you know about, once you’ve gotten over your fear of getting in there and writing, it’s very tempting to add something to the stub. You just insert a line, maybe just a phrase, giving some information that you know.
And then later you check back. Often you’ll find someone else has added more, so you add more, or you edit what they’ve added, or change it if you think it’s wrong… And you’re off. It’s like the story of the Magic Stone that made Stone Soup – the inspiration behind the famous Fractint fractal graphics program. Look it up!
Once you’ve started, it’s fun and addictive. Now, I will generally just on the spot edit pages when I see mistakes. I write stubs just off the cuff if I know anything about the subject, maybe doing considerable research first if I’m not sure of my knowledge. I also sometimes sit down and write complete non-stub articles, if it’s something I’m confident I know about. I will happily leap in and start major changes on an article if I am confident.
I don’t get much involved in the Wikipedia community; I haven’t emblazoned my userinfo page with WP-specific banners and graphics, I don’t generally attend meets or anything, but I use the site almost daily and if I have time I roam around reading anything of interest and editing as I go. I find it fun, I enjoy sharing my knowledge, it pleases me when I see my changes accepted and used and my articles linked to from others and so on. I like writing; I am a rather didactic or pedagogical type of person, so I like lecturing; and I thrive on peer approval. So I find it interesting, fun and fulfilling.
2.
It’s growing better all the time. I find it a good feeling that I’m a small part of building it – I feel virtuous, that I’m doing something good. I already find WP an invaluable reference source and it is only getting better. I’m not fussed about size, but it’s good because it’s free, it’s instant, it’s online and it’s Free in the Free Software sense. (/Libre/ as well as /gratuit/, to resort to French, as English only has the 1 word “free” for 2 different concepts.) It’s not anyone’s property – it’s open to all. If I were aiding some profit-making company, I wouldn’t do it.
3.
I believe and hope so, yes. As WP gets bigger and deeper & more authoritative, there’s more reason to use it for reference, and the more people who use it, the more contribute to it. So I think it’s snowballing and hope that it will continue to do so for a long time to come. I imagine that this will not continue indefinitely; at some point, it will have got to the stage where most of the articles are already fairly definitive and there will be less and less to add. However, new discoveries, new things needing explanation and so on should make its growth fairly eternal – it’s just that it will, perhaps, asymptotically grow more and more slowly in decades to come. I hope it never stops altogether, though!
