Sharing Nicely

My friend Rishab Ghosh occasionally invites me to moonlight with the Collaborative Creativity Group at the United Nations University MERIT. Most recently I participated in designing the Wikipedia survey, which is coming to an end as I post this.

Nobody likes to fill out online surveys, but Wikipedia gets an incredible 65,000 hits per second, so we were prepared for thousands of respondents — secretely hoping for tens of thousands — but the results are just mind-blowing: almost 180,000 people completed the survey.

Over the next few months, we will be cleaning the data (sigh), producing some basic descriptive analysis and testing a number of research questions in more detail. Some of the things we are looking at include incentives for contributors, awareness of the administrative structure behind the site, quality perceptions, expertise levels, and gender dynamics. Finally we will remove all personal information that would allow identification of the respondent and make the data available to other researchers – sometime in 2009. I will occasionally blog about our progress here, but everything will be documented officially on the CCG site.

Technorati Tags: open content, wikipedia, merit