Editors contribute to the Wikimedia projects. For this executive summary, participants from various Wikimedia projects were grouped into regions based on language in order to apply sampling weights[1]
Wikipedias
North America/Western Europe French, German, Italian, Dutch, Other Western European languages ♦ Ibero countries Spanish, Portuguese ♦ Eastern Europe Russian, other Central and Eastern European languages ♦ Asia/India Chinese, Japanese and other Asian languages ♦ Middle East/Africa Arabic and other African languages ♦ English English Wikipedia.
Other Wikimedia projects
Commons, Wikidata, and all other projects and languages are in one group.
Affiliates
Wikimedia Affiliates are officially recognized organizations who represent Wikimedia around the world. They include:
Wikimedia Chapters
Wikimedia Thematic Organizations
Wikimedia user groups
Program leaders
Wikimedia program leaders are those individuals who conduct outreach activities to help share Wikimedia to the world and to engage folks in contributing. Popular programs organized by Wikimedians include:
Editathons, editing workshops, editing contests
Conferences
Wikipedia Education programs
GLAM
Wiki Loves Monuments
Technical contributors
Technical contributors are sometimes also called "volunteer developers". They include anyone who contributors to the process of improving Wikimedia technology, from those who submit bug reports, those who create bots and tools, and those who write software for the MediaWiki code base.
The questions from this survey came from various Wikimedia Foundation teams, who submitted their questions through a proposal process. Teams were encouraged to focus their questions based on their long-term goals and their existing programs. Thirteen teams participated and the survey contained 260 questions that were divided among multiple audiences. The questions aimed at learning information about the following goals:
Growing Wikimedia communities
Improving community health
Improving collaboration and communications
Improving software for contributors
Increasing software awareness and use
Improving information sharing for program leaders and affiliates
Developing the capacity of affiliates and program leaders
Improving access to research materials by contributors
Improving understanding of movement fundraising and fundraising needs
Increasing awareness of GLAM and Libraries
Increasing knowledge and capacity related to policy issues
Data collection.
The survey reached out to five audiences, which included very active editors (100+ edits), Active editors (5 to 100 edits), Wikimedia Affiliates, Program leaders, Technical contributors (volunteer developers). The sampling strategy for this survey was to sample editors several language Wikipedia projects, as well as Wikimedia commons, wikidata and other wikimedia projects. In addition to editors, we reached out to volunteer developers through mailing lists as well as program leaders and Wikimedia affiliates through known contacts. We sampled all editors who edited wikipedia from December 2015 through December 2016, with a total population of about 132,500 editors. The questions were translated into 12 languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian.
Analysis.
The analysis you will find in this report is fairly basic and descriptive. The volume of data makes it difficult to dig into specific research question. Furthermore, each Foundation team has their own specific questions they needed answered. Teams are being asked to reflect on their results and publish their findings and actions in their individual reports. The raw data will be made available at a later date for use for researchers and others.
↑Our sampling strategy took the 132,000 contributors from December 2015 through December 2016 and divided them into strata, from which we sampled. We apply weights to help generalize the data to the population of each strata. Due to low response rates, we must be cautious about making summative statements about the population. We report medians across each the groups. These groupings were cross checked by reported country of residence.