User:WikiInquirer

Say Hi to the Wiki Inquirer!

I'm a 25 year-old undergraduate from the National University of Singapore, majoring in computing and pursuing a minor in business. Currently, I'm in my fourth and final year of school and I am doing some research on knowledge management and virtual collaboration (see below for more details about my honours year project). And as a result, my stress barometer has been pretty heady of late.

My project on Wikipedia

Well, to be totally honest, I have always been a lazy person and like all lazy persons, we support Newton's First Law. I have always deplored research, raking up piles of books and journals in search of some theoretical needle is not on my Top 20 Most Exciting Things to Do Before Armageddon. And then Wikipedia swam into my awareness in 2002. Imagine "the sum of all human knowledge" that is made freely accessible to everyone and anyone. This is the vision for Wikipedia as laid down by its co-founder, Jimmy Wales. Information served to you in the convenience of a few simple mouse clicks. Not only is the content freely accessible, it is also 'open' in the sense of the OSS movement; the content is 'open' for editing, allowing for mass participation and collaboration over the Internet.


Despite a lot of nay-saying and grumbling from the hard-nosed academics, Wikipedia is growing and growing, in part due to the discovery of a new kind of demand on the Internet: user-generated content. And also simply because Wikipedia is useful. Personally, I use Wikipedia as a quick and easy lookup for my information needs. Then I follow the pointers given to other sources. Or it can give me some general idea of what the subject of my query is about. Wikipedia is a great starting place in my search for knowledge. Sure, Wikipedia is not entirely reliable and trustworthy. From time to time, we do read press reports highlighting glaring inaccuracies in Wikipedia. But the Wikipedia administrators are fighting the good fight against the vandals and them smelly trolls. Wikipedia is a tool that should be exercised with some common sense and due diligence -- don't take things at face value, cross-validate your findings.

When I was asked to undertake a research project some weeks back, naturally I wanted to do something about Wikipedia. I wish to find out what motivates strangers from around the globe to collaborate and contribute to a public good like Wikipedia. Why would people come forward and donate their time, effort and knowledge? What's in it for them? In psychology speak (following Deci and Ryan), how do the intrinsic/extrinsic motivations of the knowledge contributor affect the quantity and quality of edits? Interesting questions to ask.

My progress so far

I have downloaded the 20061130 stub dumps and I am importing the data on Xampp, a very convenient LAMP stack which bundles up Apache, phpmyadmin and mySql in a single neat package. The data import is still ongoing, the last I checked; the process has been running for 50 days now (since Jan 12, 2007). I have to be patient. Anyway, there's always work to do. I have launched an online survey to gather some feedback from the Wikipedia community.
User:WikiInquirer/WikiStudy