Why the world reads Wikipedia: What we learned about reader motivation from a recent research study – Wikimedia Blog
ab1630's bookmarks 2018-03-15
Summary:
"Wikimedia’s mission is to provide educational content and to effectively disseminate it. Doing so requires understanding the needs and motivations of the people who read Wikipedia. In this blog post, we discuss what we learned about Wikipedia reader motivations and needs across 14 languages from a recent research study....
“Why are you reading this article today?”...This is the question we posed to a sample of Wikipedia readers across 14 languages (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian) in June 2017[1] with two goals in mind: to gain a deeper understanding of our readers’ needs, motivations, and characteristics across Wikipedia languages, and to verify the robustness of the results we observed in English Wikipedia in 2016. With the help of Wikipedia volunteers, we collected more than 215,000 responses during this follow-up study, and in this blog post, we will share with you what we learned through the first phase of data analysis..."