Matthew Salganik - Princeton University

Wiki Surveys

    Date:  09/18/2014 (Thu)

    Time:  3:30pm- 5:00pm

    Location:  Seminar will be held on-site: Gross Hall - 103

    Organizer:  Maria-Giovanna Merli, Ph.D./ Jim Moody


Meeting Schedule: Login or email the organizer to schedule a meeting.

    All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.

    8:30am - Breakfast (Giovanna Merli)

    9:30am - Hang Young Lee

   10:00am - Jake Fisher

   10:30am - Brad Fulton

   11:00am - Achim Edelmann

   11:30am - Joseph Lariscy

   12:00pm - Lunch (DNAC)

    1:15pm - Andrew Miles, also Open for DuPRI Students

    1:45pm - OPEN

    2:15pm - Lynn Smith-Lovin (Allen Building, Room 339)

    2:45pm - Tiantian Yang (Allen Building, Room 253)

    3:15pm - Prepare for seminar

    3:30pm - Seminar Presentation (3:30pm to 5:00pm)


    Additional Comments:  ABSTRACT: In the social sciences, there is a longstanding tension between data collection methods that facilitate quantification and those that are open to unanticipated information. Advances in technology now enable new, hybrid methods that can combine some of the benefits of both approaches. Drawing inspiration both from online information aggregation systems like Wikipedia and from traditional survey research, we propose a new class of research instruments called wiki surveys. Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions from participants, we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from respondents. We develop three general principles that underlie wiki surveys: they should be greedy, collaborative, and adaptive. Building on these principles, we develop methods for data collection and data analysis for one type of wiki survey, a pairwise wiki survey. We then present results from www.allourideas.org, a free and open-source website we created that enables groups all over the world to deploy wiki surveys. To date, more than 4,000 wiki surveys have been created, and they have collected over 200,000 ideas and 5 million votes. We describe the methodological challenges involved in collecting and analyzing this type of data and present a case study of a wiki survey created by the New York City Mayor's Office. [Joint work with Karen E.C. Levy]. To see how a wiki survey works, visit www.allourideas.org