Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikidemia/Studies

Major proposed and ongoing studies of Wikipedia use should be listed and categorized here. Hypotheses, methods, and implementations can be discussed here if public; and should be noted after experiments have been completed.

Methodologies

• Randomized subsets - a traditional way to run large-scale experiments in a neutral way is to identify a class of visitors, editors, or pages; select a randomized subset of that class; and introduce a variation to the randomized subset. Then metrics can be evaluated for both the subset and the entire class, and inferences drawn about what effects the variation had.

• Stratification - With or without randomized subsets, stratification involves identifying a metric, splitting up a class into quintiles

• Pilot studies - running small, short initial studies to provide an example of how to run and evaluate a study; and to iron out implementation details specific to Wikipedia and its community.

Studies

First edit

What motivates readers to edit the site?

• New page creation
• Minor corrections - What encourages users to fix typos and other quick mistakes?
• Sandboxes - what encourages users to try editing the sandbox, the introduction page, etc? o find out about wiki syntax?

Recognition

What effect does recognition have on editing?

• Sending notices to people when articles they've touched are featured on the main page.
• ...

Donations

There have been many good suggestions about ways to improve donation drives and funrdaisers for Wikipedia; a specific idea follows. Please add other ideas in their own sections below.

What motivates readers to donate? How do changes to link placement and text affect donations?

• During fund drives
• During the rest of the year?
• Stratified across frequency of reading contribution

What statistics could be gathered to help answer these questions? Both general and specific statistics are welcome.

• Queries on an entire history-laded database
• Queries on randomized subsets of pages/histories
• Queries on randomized subsets of users
• The # of readers per page, and their referrers; by date and time (anonymized)
• The most popular search queries / terms; and the actions of those who entered them (anonymized)
• ...

What variations could be tried out to study the influences on contribution and donor relationships over time?

• Changing the anonymous sitenotice
• Changing the reactions of a body of complicit editors to the target visitor
• Changing the default site skin
• ...

Retention

What do long-term contributors have in common? How do they interact with one another? What encourages these people to stay, or to leave?

Metrics and statistics

• Popular pages (from en:WP), Pages from English Wikipedia with more than 1000 hits in Feb 2004 (from meta).
• Most referenced articles (en:WP)
• Breakdown of visitors by country (earliest data from the french cluster; cf. Submarine)