Research:Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Behaviour/Prevalence of Wikipedia use cases
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We present the distribution of responses to the survey questions across the 14 Wikipedia languages of the study. We compute the weighted percentages of survey respondents with specific motivations, information needs, and prior knowledge, where the weights are computed based on methods described in Correcting for survey bias section LINK. We also assess whether the survey responses are robust over time, a key step in assuring that the responses we receive can be used to infer insights about Wikipedia readers.
Motivation
Studying the motivations of survey respondents, we observe the following:
- Wikipedia is read in a large spectrum of motivations with no clearly dominant one in any of the languages.
- Intrinsic learning is the most dominant motivator reported in all languages except three: English, Dutch, and Japanese for which media is the most dominant motivator.
- Media is reported as one of the top motivators across all language with the exception of Bengali and Hindi.
- There are major differences across languages when considering intrinsic learning: The response shares for intrinsic learning are generally lower for Western European languages (Dutch: 21%, English: 27%) and substantially higher for Eastern European languages (Romanian: 42%, Russian: 41%, Ukrainian: 41%) as well as Western/Central Asian languages (Arabic: 40 %, Bengali: 55%, Hindi: 48%).
- Common motivators are intrinsic learning (mean: 37%), media (mean: 25%), conversations (mean: 24%), work or school-related tasks (mean: 18%), current event (mean: 17%), and the need for making personal decisions (mean: 13%).
- The percentage of responses for work or school related motivations as well as being bored or randomly exploring Wikipedia for fun diverge significantly between some of the languages. While work or school related motivations are reported only 10% of the times in English Wikipedia, they are reported 31% (more than three times as often) in Spanish Wikipedia. We recommend future studies to keep track of this motivation as the differences may be explained by the differences in school season times in South America (primarily Spanish speaking) vs. North America and the rest of the northern hemisphere. Also, people report being bored as a motivator for visiting Wikipedia as low as 10% of the times in Hindi, Romanian, and Ukrainian Wikipedia, and more than 20% of the times in English, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic Wikipedia.
- The answer “other” was only rarely selected (with maximum at 10%) indicating the robustness of the taxonomy defined in earlier research.
Information need
Prior knowledge
