Small Wiki Editor Engagement Project/Report/Monthly (June-July 2012)

From July 4 to July 18, 2012, we ran a 2 week survey targeted at readers of Bangla Wikipedia. This helped us to understand more about the needs of the readers and editors of Bangla Wikipedia that this project aims to engage.

Background and overview of the survey

The survey was intended to gather information from the overall readership of Bangla Wikipedia, information about editors or potential editors and the status of current help and support system. We aimed to figure out the need of new editors and readers interested in becoming editors, and understand what sort of help might be useful for them to contribute to Bangla Wikipedia.

We prepared a questionnaire with around 29 questions (not every question was visible to everyone, some conditional questions only appeared to selective participants based on their answers). Although Bangla has a very small editing community, there was a high level of participation and awareness about this survey in the community, and in 2 weeks we got 1107 complete responses. There were an additional 737 unfinished responses when we closed the survey.

The questions of the survey were distributed under four sections – reading, editing, help and support, and readers’ information.

Key findings

Reading

Most people know about Bangla Wikipedia from English Wikipedia through the "other languages" links

Students form the majority of Bangla Wikipedia readers, and many use it every day:

60.5% participants said Bangla Wikipedia is useful for their study
At second position, 20.5% participants are knowledge seekers – use Bangla Wikipedia to gather information.
Most of the survey participants (34.6%) said they use Wikipedia every day, while 28.8% said they use it only they find a need for it. Other participants (28.1%) use Wikipedia from a period of few times a week to few times a month. 8.4% were new readers who said it was their first time at Bangla Wikipedia.

People get to know about Bangla Wikipedia from different sources:

Inter-wiki links on articles of other Wikipedias seem to play a key role on Bangla Wikipedia. The majority of respondents (36.2%) said they knew about Bangla Wikipedia from “other languages” links from English Wikipedia.
Also 32.5% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from search engines and rest of the participants knew about Bangla Wikipedia from social networking websites, newspapers, blog and forum sites.

78.4% participants do not have an account in Bangla Wikipedia

Most readers found Bangla Wikipedia to be useful, but missing important information:

74.7% found Bangla Wikipedia useful, 21.8% found it “somewhat” useful, and 3.5% did not find Bangla Wikipedia useful to fulfill their need.
Those who did not find Bangla Wikipedia useful raised few reasons behind it. 80.7% participants said that “Articles do not have enough information," which is a pretty common problem for smaller Wikipedias. Other reasons include readability of articles, outdated information, lack of enough articles on various topics, incomplete articles, etc.

Most of the readers do not have an account in Bangla Wikipedia as they do not need to have an account to read. For those who do create accounts, Bangla Wikipedia has enabled automatic welcoming by bot for several months now. 62.8% of those who have an account in Bangla Wikipedia received a welcome message on their talk page, and around 80% of them found that welcome message useful.

Suggestions to improve the readability of Bangla Wikipedia gave us a total of 771 responses, most often suggesting to:

add new articles on various topics
complete articles
improve the article writing
add and update information

Editing

Only one-fourth of the survey participants were Bangla Wikipedia editors
More than half of the participants know anyone can edit Wikipedia, including themselves
Most of the people who know about editing Wikipedia from this survey said they will start editing or will think about editing in future

Many readers are aware they can edit Wikipedia:

One fourth of the survey participants do not edit Bangla Wikipedia.
Of those who do not edit, the majority (62.8%) have simply never tried.
But more than half (53.5%) of total participants already know they can edit Wikipedia.
Most of the people who did not know they can edit now expressed their interest to think about editing Wikipedia in future.

Participants pointed out following reasons they think it is complicated to edit Bangla Wikipedia.

Most of them (33.3%) feel a need to have guidance on where they can start, as they are not familiar with this environment.
The Wikipedia editor panel and the Wikitext/Wikicode is the second biggest issue – 26.3% said they do not understand the editor panel. The visual editor will be useful to solve this problem.
As Bangla has its own script, there is a need of separate typing tool to write. 17.5% participants mentioned they do not know how to write Bangla in computers.
There are also people who do not know why they should write in Bangla Wikipedia, which points us to the need of motivation and awareness about Bangla Wikipedia.
Like other developing nations, mobile internet is growing way faster than home internet and 2.3% participants said they cannot edit Bangla Wikipedia because they are using mobile devices to read, and contributing from mobile devices is too difficult.

Help and support

Most readers need help to edit Bangla Wikipedia

But most of them do not know where to find help

Most of the survey participants need more help to edit Wikipedia:

56% need more help editing Wikipedia, and 44% say they don't need much help but can get it by reading through help pages.
63.4% do not know where they can find help about editing Wikipedia. This points to the need for a well-structured and user-friendly online dashboard for getting help.

Respondents want a variety of ways to get help in the help system. These include:

Step-by-step help tutorials on what to do and how to do it is the most preferable (71.2%) helping structure
52.6% would also like wiki help pages.
43.7% like the idea of a forum site where they can ask questions and Wikipedians can answer them.
Several (30.3%) also preferred direct online help via online chats (like IRC help, Google Talk or Yahoo chat), and some (2.5%) prefer help in person.

Most of the participants (77.7%) would like to get help from Wikipedians, just 22.3% think help pages are enough. More than half or the participants (55.1%) do not know any Wikipedians to ask help in person.

People mentioned asked for editing help on several basic topics including:

writing new articles
translating articles from English Wikipedia (it is major source of information to small Wikipedias)
adding references
uploading images

Some also showed interest in learning intermediate skills including:

writing articles with help of contents from external websites and understanding about copyright
dealing with the the editor panel and wikimarkup

A significant number (44.7%) of participants are not sure about what they need or where they can start so they would like to have a guidance on what to work on, and where and how to start.

As internet connection and speed an issue is an issue to many readers, they also expressed the need of short video and PDF tutorials so they can easily download the help materials and watch/read offline.

Demographics

Only 5.6% of the survey respondents are female
Most users are between the ages of 16 to 26 years
Most of the participants are university and college graduates
Majority of participants are from Bangladesh

In male-female comparison, only 5.6% participants were female. As pointed out in the reading section, people between the ages of 16 to 26 cover the largest portion (62.2%) of the readers. Most of the readers are students and they use Bangla Wikipedia for their study. Service covers 24.8% of the participants.

38.6% participants have a university graduation, 29.8% are college graduates, 19.8% have masters degree or above.

On the country comparison, the majority of the users are from Bangladesh.

81.2% of the survey respondents are from Bangladesh. Bangladesh has 160 million Bangla speakers, which is more than half of the total Bangla-speaking population (around 280 million) in the world.
16.3% of participants are from India. With around 80 million Bangla speakers, India has the second largest group of Bangla speakers in the world. Most of them live in the West Bengal state of India.
2.5% of participants read Bangla Wikipedia from other countries, and the United States is first among them, although United Kingdom has the third largest Bangla population.

Gender gap

Compared with 1024 responses from male readers, we got just 62 responses from female readers of Bangla Wikipedia:

The majority of them are students and need it for their studies
66.1% of them are between 16 to 26 years in age
Most of the female readers (33.9%) are college educated and 29% are university graduates
79% of the female readers are from Bangladesh, 14.5% are from India, 6.5% are from rest of the world
21% of the female respondents said they edit Bangla Wikipedia. If those who did not, after learning that they can edit, most of the women expressed their interest to contribute.
50% female participants clearly expressed their willing to edit, while in overall response, majority (56.6%) said they will think about it, and 37.9% directly said they will edit.
Female readers emphasize wanting more step-by-step help.

Overall response statistics

The questions in bold are the questions from the survey. All questions and the breakdown of responses (minus free text responses) are listed below.

Reading

Most of the participants are students and they find Bangla Wikipedia useful for their study

Why do you read Bangla Wikipedia?

60.5% said they are students and they find Wikipedia useful for their study
20.5% said they use Wikipedia as it is their hobby
10.0% said they find Wikipedia useful at their work
09.1% said they read Bangla Wikipedia after being forwarded by search engines

How frequently do you read Bangla Wikipedia?

34.6% use Bangla Wikipedia almost every day
28.8% use Bangla Wikipedia when they have a need
17.9% use Wikipedia few times a week
10.3% use Wikipedia few times a month
08.4% said it was their first time in Wikipedia

Most people know about Bangla Wikipedia from English Wikipedia through their "other languages" links. As well as search engines and social networks also play an important role in online outreach

How do you know about Bangla Wikipedia?

36.2% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from other languages link of English Wikipedia
32.5% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from search engines
11.3% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitters, etc.)
10.8% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from newspapers and magazines
09.2% knew about Bangla Wikipedia from blog or forum sites

Do you find Bangla Wikipedia useful?

74.7% find Bangla Wikipedia useful
21.8% think Bangla Wikipedia is more or less useful
3.50% did not find Bangla Wikipedia useful

What is that you did not find useful in Bangla Wikipedia?

80.7% find not having enough information in articles is the main reason of not being useful
32.5% think articles are not well written
24.6% think information are outdated
14.6% mentioned other reasons that include (prioritized list):

Lack of enough articles and topics
Lack of detail information on a topic and incomplete articles
Wrong or biased information
The way the articles are written, mixing up with English and Bangla texts
Contradiction of Bangla of Bangladesh and Bangla of West Bengal, India

78.4% participants do not have an account in Bangla Wikipedia

Do you have an account on Bangla Wikipedia?

78.4% do not have an account in Bangla Wikipedia
21.6% have an account in Bangla Wikipedia

After creating the account, did you receive a welcome message on your talk page?

62.8% received a welcome message after creating the accounts
31.4% do not know if they got a welcome message or not
5.90% did not receive a welcome message

Did you find the welcome message helpful?

79.3% find the welcome message useful
18.0% find the welcome message more or less useful
2.70% did not receive the welcome message useful

Editing

Only one-fourth of the survey participants were Bangla Wikipedia editors

Do you edit in Bangla Wikipedia?

75.3% do not edit Bangla Wikipedia
24.7% edit Bangla Wikipedia

Have you ever tried to edit Bangla Wikipedia?

62.8% did not start editing Bangla Wikipedia yet
31.4% tried to edit Bangla Wikipedia but they were not sure where to start
05.8% tried to edit Bangla Wikipedia

Have you ever edited Wikipedia in another language?

87.6% did not edit any other Wikipedia
12.4% edited other Wikipedias which most of the edited English Wikipedia

More than half of the participants know anyone can edit Wikipedia, including themselves

Do you know that including you anyone can edit this Wikipedia and write articles like the ones you are reading?

53.5% know that they can edit Bangla Wikipedia
24.7% said they sort of know this fact
21.8% do not know that can edit

Most of the people who know about editing Wikipedia from this survey said they will start editing or will think about editing in future

As you now know that you can edit, would you like to start editing Bangla Wikipedia?

56.6% will think about editing Bangla Wikipedia
37.9% want to edit Bangla Wikipedia
05.5% prefer not to edit

Why do you think you cannot edit Bangla Wikipedia? (please select all that apply)

33.3% do no know where to start
26.3% do not understand the editor panel
17.5% do not know how to write Bangla in computer
10.5% do not know why they should write in Bangla Wikipedia
09.9% specified other reasons that include:

Slow typing speed and Bangla is hart to type as it has more characters than English
Editing from mobile devices which make editing complex

Help and support

Most readers need help to edit Bangla Wikipedia

Do you need any help to edit Bangla Wikipedia?

56.0% need help to edit Bangla Wikipedia
44.0% do not need much help to edit and they can figure things out with help pages

But most of them do not know where to find help

Do you know where you can find help about editing Bangla Wikipedia?

63.4% do not know where they can find help
36.6% know where they can find help about editing Bangla Wikipedia

What kind of help would you most like to have as you're editing Bangla Wikipedia? (choose all that apply)

71.2% would prefer to see step-by-step tutorials that teach them what to do
52.6% would prefer Help pages with information that they can read
43.7% would prefer online help forums where they can ask questions and experienced people will answer
30.3% would prefer one on one help from another experienced Wikipedia user online
02.5% would prefer one on one help from another experienced Wikipedia user in person
05.9% would prefer other kind of ways of helping that include:

Video tutorials
Offline tutorials, like PDF tutorials in Bangla

Have you ever asked any Wikipedia user to help you understand how to edit Wikipedia?

14.2% asked Wikipedia users for editing help
55.1% did not ask for editing help as they do not know any Wikipedia user
30.7% did not ask any Wikipedia user

Do you want a Wikipedia user to help you online about editing Bangla Wikipedia?

34.2% would like to have a Wikipedia user to help them
43.5% would like to have on-call help from a Wikipedia user
22.3% would like to see some help pages as enough

What do you need help with? (please select all that apply)

59.9% would like to have help on how to write new articles
57.3% would like to have help on how to translate articles from English Wikipedia
53.6% would like to have help on how to add references
51.5% would like to have help on how to write with help from other websites and deal with copyright
48.8% would like to have help on how to upload images on Wikipedia
48.3% would like to have help on how to write in Wikipedia editor, help with understanding the code used for writing
44.7% would like to have some guidelines on something to work on
06.6% would like to have help on other matters that include:

How to write in Bangla
How to take participation in discussion
Where to report about articles
How to add images on articles
How to maintain article's reliability

Demographics

File:What is your gender?.png

Like other Wikipedias, Bangla Wikipedia is also male dominant. Only 5.6% of the respondents are female

What is your gender?

92.5% are male
05.6% are female
01.9% preferred not to disclose their gender

Participants by age. Most of them are 16-26 years old

What is your age?

42.1% are between 21-26 years
20.1% are between 16-20 years
15.1% are between 27-30 years
11.2% are between 31-40 years
06.0% are between 41-60 years
03.3% are in below 16 years
01.7% preferred not to disclose their age
00.5% have the age 60 years or above

What is your profession?

60.1% are students
24.8% are in service
05.8% are in business
05.6% are in others categories which include:

Web developers, programmers, and IT professionals
Teachers
Retired persons
Freelance workers
and several others

03.7% are unemployed

What is the highest academic degree do you have?

38.6% have bachelor degree
29.8% have graduated from college or finished diploma
19.8% have masters degree or above
11.8% have high school degree

Participants by country; majority participants are from Bangladesh

Which country are you from?

81.2% are from Bangladesh
16.3% are from India
02.5% are from other countries that include:

United States
Canada
Australia
New Zealand
Italy
Germany
France
Spain