Research talk:Awareness of Wikipedia and its usage patterns

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Arab gap[edit]

Interesting! Was this about any wikipedia.org subdomain or some specific subdomain? I find particularly interesting how Arab (Arab Israeli, I suppose?) respondents are 60 % more likely to answer "Sometimes yes, sometimes no" to "do you find what you are looking for?" and 50 % less likely to respond "Every time". This probably means there is some big gap in coverage (or even neutrality?), which clearly correlates to the worse scores this group shows for "Trust 76 - 100", "Encountered information requiring correction, but did not know I could correct it" and "Encountered information requiring correction, but decided not to do anything". There may be a vicious circle to break here. Very useful findings, looking forward to hearing more! --Nemo 09:46, 14 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nemo,
I will try to answer your questions according to the information available to me:
  1. The survey asked about Wikipedia in general, not a specific subdomain
  2. It makes sense that the Arab-Israeli population finds less relevant information on Wikipedia since on the one hand they have the Hebrew Wikipedia which is written almost entirely by the native Hebrew-speaking population (Jewish population), and on the other hand the Arabic Wikpiedia which is mostly written by Arabic speakers outside and unrelated to Israel. Therefore there is some systemic bias which is unavoidable as long as few Arab-Israelis edit Wikipedia. We are trying to do outreach but so far have had mixed success.
  3. The poll results that you pointed to about Arab-Israelis is in accordance with the general trend of reduced involvement by the Arab-Israeli population. It's my personal opinion (that does not represent Wikimedia Israel in any way) that this is because many Arab-Israelis have a severe identity crisis between the home country of Israel and the Arab ethnicity, which might sometimes seem at odds. There is a general mistrust among Arab-Israelis of the Israeli establishment and the tendency is not to cooperate with Hebrew-speaking groups. Still, this is not a clear-cut rule and many Arab-Israelis want to edit the Hebrew Wikipedia too.
—Ynhockey (talk) 10:14, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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