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Why the world reads Wikipedia

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By Florian Lemmerich, Bob West, and Leila Zia

The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.

Wikimedia’s mission is to provide educational content and to effectively disseminate it. Doing so requires understanding the needs and motivations of the people who read Wikipedia. In this blog post, we discuss what we learned about Wikipedia reader motivations and needs across 14 languages from a recent research study.

Photo by Michael Mandiberg, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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لماذا تقرأ هذه المقالة اليوم؟", "আপনি কেন এ নিবন্ধটি আজ পড়ছেন?", "為什麼你今天會讀這篇條目？", "Waarom lees je dit artikel vandaag?", "Why are you reading this article today?", "Warum lesen Sie diesen Artikel gerade?", "?למה אתה קורא את הערך הזה היום", "यह लेख आज आप क्यों पढ़ रहे हैं?", "Miért olvasod most ezt a szócikket?", "あなたは今日何のためにこの項目を読んでいますか？", "De ce citiți acest articol anume astăzi?", "Почему вы читаете эту статью сегодня?", "Por qué estas leyendo este artículo hoy?", "Чому Ви читаєте цю статтю сьогодні?

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This is the question we posed to a sample of Wikipedia readers across 14 languages (Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian) in June 2017^[1] with two goals in mind: to gain a deeper understanding of our readers’ needs, motivations, and characteristics across Wikipedia languages, and to verify the robustness of the results we observed in English Wikipedia in 2016. With the help of Wikipedia volunteers, we collected more than 215,000 responses during this follow-up study, and in this blog post, we will share with you what we learned through the first phase of data analysis.

^ The choice of the languages for this study is the result of the following considerations: We ideally wanted to have at least one language from each of the language families as part of the study, and wanted to find languages that where the language communities welcome this study in and support us. We chose the following languages: Arabic (Right-to-left, covers large parts of the Middle East and North Africa), Dutch (per Wikimedia Netherlands request), English (to repeat the results from the initial survey), Hindi (at New Readers team’s request), Japanese (One of the CJKV languages that we know very little about despite the high traffic the language brings to Wikimedia projects), Spanish (a Romance language which helps us understand South America users and their needs to a good extent). 2. All the other languages we added after at least one person from their community responded to our call on the Wikimedia-l mailing list with interest.

[1] The choice of the languages for this study is the result of the following considerations: We ideally wanted to have at least one language from each of the language families as part of the study, and wanted to find languages that where the language communities welcome this study in and support us. We chose the following languages: Arabic (Right-to-left, covers large parts of the Middle East and North Africa), Dutch (per Wikimedia Netherlands request), English (to repeat the results from the initial survey), Hindi (at New Readers team’s request), Japanese (One of the CJKV languages that we know very little about despite the high traffic the language brings to Wikimedia projects), Spanish (a Romance language which helps us understand South America users and their needs to a good extent). 2. All the other languages we added after at least one person from their community responded to our call on the Wikimedia-l mailing list with interest.

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