Wikipedia:Requests for comment/English Wikipedia readership survey 2013/What's the demographic distribution of our readers
We know that the gender of Wikipedia's editors is heavily skewed towards males, but it would be nice to know if our readers are skewed as well. Similarly, age and income distributions can help us identify where we are failing to deliver Wikipedia. --EpochFail(talk • work) 14:39, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
- What would you do with that information if you could obtain it? ‑Scottywong| confess _ 23:11, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
- You would target each demographic with demographic-specific questions. This makes the survey more relevant to the surveyed, improve response rate, and probably improves information accuracy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:17, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
- There would seem to be a very high probability of misuse of the information - certain people armed with a database of who is under 18 would want to hit them with image censorship, for example. My feeling is that income would also be prone to abuse - (probably starting with disparaging comments toward unemployed editors, and gradually going downhill from there). Wnt (talk) 16:01, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
- This one reason why I suggest the surveying should be done in the real world. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:27, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
- @Wnt No one is suggesting making the results available for targetting, or indeed doing a census of all readers. We are just suggesting doing a survey. We might use it to discover the age at which people start using Wikipedia, and subsequent debates might then have people saying "practically no-one under the age of x reads Wikipedia, or conversely by the age of y more people are reading Wikipedia than at any other age". But this would not create a database of who is under 18 even if the survey concluded that all our readers were under 18. For a database that you can use to contact people you need some contact information. ϢereSpielChequers 02:43, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
- The data would need to be fully anonymized and untraceable if collected, so as to preclude any chance of such abuse. — C M B J 11:40, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
- There would seem to be a very high probability of misuse of the information - certain people armed with a database of who is under 18 would want to hit them with image censorship, for example. My feeling is that income would also be prone to abuse - (probably starting with disparaging comments toward unemployed editors, and gradually going downhill from there). Wnt (talk) 16:01, 4 May 2013 (UTC)
- You would target each demographic with demographic-specific questions. This makes the survey more relevant to the surveyed, improve response rate, and probably improves information accuracy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 23:17, 3 May 2013 (UTC)