Wikimedian Demographics

WV:WMDGS

Welcome to Wikimedian Demographics. This is a research project aimed at both understanding who contributes to Wikimedia projects (and why), as well as helping to allow the community's voice to be heard on subjects that affect its members.

To participate:

1. make sure you're logged in

2. add the wikitext {{subst:wmdgs-preload/all}} to this page.

3. Save the page to load the basic survey, and then follow the instructions you find there (each survey has it's own instructions, which you can "turn off" by removing the "y" from the first question field).

Updates: The following surveys have been added since the last announcement (they are included in the current version of preload/all):

Wikimedia Commons survey (added 25 January):
{{subst:Wmdgs-commons-survey1-preload}}
Nationality, residence and travel surveys for Asia, Africa, Oceania, and South America (added 26 January):
{{subst:Wmdgs-nationality, residence, and travel (Update preload)}}
Gender, sexuality, and relationships (added 28 January)
{{subst:Wmdgs-sexuality and relationships-survey1-preload}}

How it works

When you answer a survey, your answers will be shown in the form of both "answerboxes" (which you can use to check your answers), and Categories. These categories are in turn used to calculate patterns among respondents (using DynamicPageList or other tools) to calculate patterns among the Wikimedian population (for example, how many Wiktionarians are male, how many Wikibookians use IRC, etc.). As you participate in other surveys, we can compare things like "how many Wikipedians are Republican vs. Democrat?" or "are Wikinewsies more likely to have pets than wikicommonists?"

These results are partly for pure academic interest, though further surveys may be used to try to get a sense of how members of the various projects think about the management of their own projects or other projects. Other sorts of data may be requested and used by Wikiversity learning resources which need this kind of data for research purposes.

Goals

The goals are simple:

To learn about demographics and polling through creating, participating in, and interpreting surveys.
To learn about the people who participate in or make use of the Wikimedia Foundation's wikis.
To discover ways in which the wikis could be improved.

What it's not

Remember, this is demographics, not voting. This project should not be interpreted as a place for decision-making, but rather only to get a sense of who "We The Wikimedians" are, and what we think about certain issues.

Subpages with available Surveys and Polls

Aside from the basic survey, other surveys are available for a number of other topics. Go to the topic subpages for further discussion or to propose new surveys for that topic. Note: all the surveys listed below will preload when you add {{subst:wmdgs-preload/all}} to your survey response page.

Wikipedia - one survey
Operating Systems - one survey
2008 US Presidential elections -one survey
Nationality, residence, and travel - two surveys

Active discussions

The pages listed below are the 10 most recently edited topics:

(Note: this list is generated using DynamicPageList, so changes to this list will not make this page update on your watchlist. If it's not showing changes you recently made, purge the server cache to update the DPL.)

Interpreting Survey Data

We're not sure yet how to interpret the data over the long term, but for now users can look at other users' survey pages, or create interpretations using DynamicPageList.