Hi Leila and Kerry,
Thanks a lot for your insights. Indeed, the lower availability of sources,
and the relationship with knowledge might be the main factors.
It seems that there are so many topics, that just by knowing that they
exist is already an accomplishment.
It would be interesting if there would be a system to keep track of the
topics one is familiar with.
Regards
On Thu, Jan 24, 2019 at 1:39 PM Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I agree lack of alternative sources are likely to be a
factor.
Another factor might be the time available. The high s-e countries may
have a lot more competing for their eyeballs, eg Netflicks etc.
Also, on my experience of foreign students attending Australian
universities, there may also be some cultural difference in how people
think about education and learning. Some countries do appear to put a lot
of emphasis on memorising and regurgitating slabs of textbooks and other
rote learning rather than developing skills in applying that knowledge to
solve a problem. Whereas I find myself increasingly learning by trying to
absorb the main concepts and principles of a new topic but figuring I can
lookup the detail if/when I actually need to apply that knowledge
(particularly so in the WWW era, how to open a milk carton?, just look at
the YouTube video!). So I think there is a shift to just-in-time learning
happening but this relies on the meta-skill of information searching. I
suspect poorly paid and poorly educated teachers in low s-e countries are
more likely to teach using the same methods that they were taught by. This
may lead to the mindset of “if I read this Wikipedia article many times
through, I will have mastered the topic”.
Having travelled in lower s-e countries in Africa recently, many people do
see education as the key to a better future and actively invest in their
children’s education for that reason. In Kenya I often heard the term “lean
family” which meant a small number of children getting the best education
the family could afford rather than the traditional large family. I think
this was something actively promoted by their government. Many parents
proudly talked about making a personal sacrifice of some kind which was
undertaken to have more money for children’s education.
I think many of us in more developed economies see Wikipedia as useful. I
suspect there are others who see it as potentially life-changing.
Sent from my iPad
On 24 Jan 2019, at 7:33 am, Leila Zia
<leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Micru,
One hypothesis that we have is that in countries with lower
socio-economic status, the reader may not have access to a variety of
different sources for their reading needs (the availability of printed
material, books, ... can be more limited in these countries.). At the
moment, we don't have enough data from a diverse enough subset of
countries to be able to look into this. I'm hoping that in the future
iterations we can sample by country and collect enough data to be able
to validate or reject this hypothesis.
Do you have other hypotheses as why this may be happening?
Best,
Leila
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 3:02 PM David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> Hi Leila,
>
> I'm curious about the in-depth reading differences according to the
> socio-economic status. Why do you think such differences exist?
>
> Regards,
> Micru
>
>> On Sat, Jan 19, 2019 at 1:15 AM Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> As some of you know, we started a line of research back in 2016 to
>> understand Wikipedia readers better. We published the first taxonomy
>> of Wikipedia readers and we studied and characterized the reader types
>> in English Wikipedia [1]. During the past 1+ year, we focused on
>> learning about the potential differences of Wikipedia readers across
>> languages based on the taxonomy built in [1]. We've learned a lot, and
>> today we're sharing what we learnt with you.
>>
>> Some pointers:
>> * Publication:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00474
>> * Data:
>>
https://figshare.com/articles/Why_the_World_Reads_Wikipedia/7579937/1
>> * (under continuous improvement) Research page on meta:
>>
>>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Characterizing_Wikipedia_Reader_Be…
>> * Research showcase presentation:
>>
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2018
>> * A series of presentations to WMF teams
and community: Look for tasks
>> under
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T201699 with title "Present
>> the results of WtWRW" for link to slides and more info when available.
>> * We will send out a blog post about it hopefully soon. A blog post
>> about the intermediate results is at
>>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2018/03/15/why-the-world-reads-wikipedia/
In a nutshell:
* We ran the taxonomy of Wikipedia readers in 14 languages and
measured the prevalence of Wikipedia use-cases and characterized
Wikipedia readers in these languages.
* While we observe similarities in terms of the prevalence of the use
cases as well as the way we can characterize readers, we can see that
Wikipedia languages lend themselves to different distributions of
readership and characteristics. In many cases, the one-size-fit-all
solutions may simply not work for readers.
* Intrinsic learning remains as the number one motivation for people
to come to Wikipedia in the majority of the languages, followed by
media.
* In-depth reading and the reading of scientific oriented topics is
highly and negatively correlated with the socio-economic status and
Human Development Index of countries the readers in these languages
are coming from. Long articles that may seem just too long for the
bulk of our audience in US, Japan, and the Netherlands is in high
demand in India, Bolivia, Argentina, Panamá, México, …
* ...
This research was not possible without the extensive contributions by
our formal collaborators: Florian Lemmerich (RWTH Aachen University)
and Bob West (EPFL). On the WMF end, I was fortunate to work with
Diego Saez on this project as well as more recently, Isaac Johnson.
And all those in the Reading Web and Legal team who supported us
throughout the process. I also want to underline the amazing work that
the volunteers in the languages in the study did to support us heavily
to learn more about their languages, not only through help with
communications within their communities but also with the translation
task which was not an easy one as they were asked to offer their time
not only to translate but also do in-person meetings with us for us to
make sure the intent of the question is translated the same way across
the languages. Usernames Strainu, Tgr, Amire80, Awossink, Antanana,
Lyzzy, Shangkuanlc, Whym, Kaganer, عباد_ديرانية, Satdeep_Gill, Racso,
Hasive: Thank you!
Next we are going to extend this study to include demographics
information. More information about it coming out in the next few
weeks. (And I will send out a separate email to wikimedia-l about this
topic and future research over the weekend. I need some time to
finalize the message to make the message most useful for that
audience.:)
Best,
Leila
[1]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05379
--
Leila Zia
Senior Research Scientist, Lead
Wikimedia Foundation
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