Wiki survey

A view of the 'opinion space' visualization tool for a Polis wiki survey. Each user can see how similar their voting behavior is to other voters based on their closeness to one another within the two-dimensional space.

Wiki surveys or wikisurveys are a software-based survey method with similarity to how wikis evolve through crowdsourcing. In essence, they are surveys that allow participants to create the questions that are being asked.[1][2][3] As participants engage in the survey they can either vote on a survey question or create a survey question. A single open-ended prompt written by the creator of the survey determines the topic the questions should be on. The first known implementation of a wiki survey was in 2010,[4] and they have been used since then for a variety of purposes such as facilitating deliberative democracy, crowdsourcing opinions from experts and figuring out common beliefs on a given topic.[5][6][7] A notable usage of wiki surveys is in Taiwan's government system, where citizens can participate in crowdsourced lawmaking through Polis wiki surveys.[8][9][10]

Wiki surveys facilitate collective intelligence by allowing users to both contribute and respond to the survey, as well as see the results of the survey in real time. They can be seen in a more general sense as a tool for establishing consensus in large volumes of people. Wiki surveys mainly differ from consensus-building in comment sections by using a heuristic which determines the order of questions for each participant that aims to maximize consensus, not allowing replies to questions and providing visualization tools to better understand consensus.

  1. ^ Salganik, Matthew J.; Levy, Karen E. C. (2015-05-20). Helleringer, Stephane (ed.). "Wiki Surveys: Open and Quantifiable Social Data Collection". PLOS ONE. 10 (5): e0123483. Bibcode:2015PLoSO..1023483S. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0123483. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 4439069. PMID 25992565.
  2. ^ Small, Christopher; Bjorkegren, Michael; Erkkilä, Timo; Shaw, Lynette; Megill, Colin (2021-07-22). "Polis: Scaling deliberation by mapping high dimensional opinion spaces". Democracy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. 26 (2). doi:10.6035/recerca.5516. hdl:10234/196348. ISSN 2254-4135. S2CID 242371333.
  3. ^ Bass, Theo (28 January 2019). "Crowdsourcing for democracy using Wikisurveys". nesta. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  4. ^ "About this project". All Our Ideas. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  5. ^ French, Megan; Hancock, Jeff (2017-02-02). "What's the Folk Theory? Reasoning About Cyber-Social Systems". SSRN. Rochester, NY. SSRN 2910571.
  6. ^ Wong, Arnold YL; Lauridsen, Henrik H.; Samartzis, Dino; Macedo, Luciana; Ferreira, Paulo H.; Ferreira, Manuela L. (2019-01-15). "Global Consensus From Clinicians Regarding Low Back Pain Outcome Indicators for Older Adults: Pairwise Wiki Survey Using Crowdsourcing". JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies. 6 (1): e11127. doi:10.2196/11127. PMC 6350088. PMID 30664493. Archived from the original on Jun 16, 2022.
  7. ^ "Featured Case Studies". The Computational Democracy Project. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  8. ^ Horton, Chris (August 21, 2018). "The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2022-02-28.
  9. ^ BBC Click (Oct 29, 2019), "Can Taiwan Reboot Democracy?", YouTube, retrieved 2022-02-28
  10. ^ Harris, Tristan; Raskin, Aza; Tang, Audrey (July 23, 2020). "22 – Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang". Your Undivided Attention. Center for Humane Technology. Retrieved 2022-03-18.