ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign2 Chen Yi Fan

Overview

Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopaedia founded in 2001, collaboratively developed over the Internet in more than 250 different languages. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet and is ranked among the ten most popular websites¹.

It has been used in many areas such as academic studies, books, conferences, court cases etc.

In our study for this assignment, a survey dataset² is provided of faculty members from two Spanish universities on teaching uses of Wikipedia. We are tasked to find out any interesting information conveyed by this survey.

Dataset Preparation

The csv data file contains 913 rows and 54 columns. The values for the categorical attributes are entered in numeric forms. With the data dictionary from the dataset webpage, I used JMP to recode the numeric values into their string format. The missing values denoted as "?" have also been removed from the list.
3 new columns have also been created, namely AgeGroup, YearExpGroup and Total Score to facilitate the analysis later on.

The final dataset after the above transformation is shown below. It is exported as csv format from JMP.

Out of the total 53 columns, 9 of them are the demographic information of the faculty members who participated in this survey, e.g. gender, domain, year of experiences etc. The other 44 columns are their responses to the survey questions. They are grouped into 13 categories. Furthermore, we can split the 13 categories into 2 groups. The first group includes 7 metrics: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Enjoyment, Quality, Visibility, Social Image and Sharing attitude. They mainly measured the usefulness and effectiveness of Wikipedia from different perspectives. From another group of factors, we can get a sense of how the faculty member made use of the Wikipedia, in which areas do they use Wikipedia for, how would they contribute to Wikipedia etc.

After the above data preparation, there are a few questions being raised.

1. What are the participants’ demographics?
2. Is there any difference in terms of perception for Wikipedia by participants’ demographic distribution?
   • This could be answered using group 1 data and the calculated field “Total Score”
3. How do the faculty members perceive Wikipedia in terms of its quality and usefulness?
   • This could also be addressed using group 1 data
4. How and which areas do faculty members use Wikipedia for?
   • This could be answered using group 2 data
5. How do users’ perception affect their behaviour?
   • This could be answered by analysing the relationship between different measurement metrics

Data Exploration

Next, the pre-processed csv dataset is imported into different visualization tools to help answer those questions.

What are the participants’ demographics?

Firstly, in order to understand participants’ demographics, the data is imported into Parallel Set as shown in the chart below.
It shows that majority (87%) participants are from UOC but only 13% are from UPF. There are more male (57%) than female (42%) participants and mainly at the age ranging from 30s (37%) to 40s (42%) with the year of experiences less than 20 years (54% < 10 years and 33% 10 to 20 years).
However, it is also noticed that most of the participants (85%) are not Wikipedia registered user.

Is there any difference of perception for Wikipedia by participants’ demographic distribution?

As it is shown above, the participants’ demographic distributions are not even, this could affect the overall perception for the usefulness and effectiveness of Wikipedia.
Hence, next I plot the graph using the dimensions, e.g. University, Userwiki, Gender and YearExpGroup in tree map to understand further how these factors affect the total score.
It shows from the graph below, females with less than 10 years working experiences Wikipedia registered users gave the highest average total score. In fact, the top 5 groups who score highest are all Wikipedia registered users. And the top 3 groups are the users with less than 20 years working experiences.

How do the faculty members perceive Wikipedia in terms of its quality and usefulness?

The group 1 likert scales are listed in the table below. Each of the scales are represented by a short label to be easier plotted in the chart. This group of metrics mainly measure the faculty members’ perception for the usefulness and quality of Wikipedia contents.

Likert Scale	Survey Items	Label
Perceived Usefulness	PU1: The use of Wikipedia makes it easier for students to develop new skills	Develop New Skills
	PU2: The use of Wikipedia improves students' learning	Improve Learning
	PU3: Wikipedia is useful for teaching	Useful for Teaching
Perceived Ease of Use	PEU1: Wikipedia is user-friendly	User Friendly
	PEU2: It is easy to find in Wikipedia the information you seek	Easy to Search
	PEU3: It is easy to add or edit information in Wikipedia	Easy to Add/Edit
Perceived Enjoyment	ENJ1: The use of Wikipedia stimulates curiosity	Stimulate Curiosity
	ENJ2: The use of Wikipedia is entertaining	Entertaining
Quality	QU1: Articles in Wikipedia are reliable	Reliable
	QU2: Articles in Wikipedia are updated	Up-to-date
	QU3: Articles in Wikipedia are comprehensive	Comprehensive
	QU4: In my area of expertise, Wikipedia has a lower quality than other educational resources	Lower Quality
	QU5: I trust in the editing system of Wikipedia	Trust in Editing System
Visibility	VIS1: Wikipedia improves visibility of students' work	Improve Visibility
	VIS2: It is easy to have a record of the contributions made in Wikipedia	Record of Contributions
	VIS3: I cite Wikipedia in my academic papers	Cite in Academic Papers
Social Image	IM1: The use of Wikipedia is well considered among colleagues	Considered Among Colleagues
	IM2: In academia, sharing open educational resources is appreciated	Appreciated of Sharing
	IM3: My colleagues use Wikipedia	Used by Colleagues
Sharing attitude	SA1: It is important to share academic content in open platforms	Share in Open Platforms
	SA2: It is important to publish research results in other media than academic journals or books	Share in Other Media
	SA3: It is important that students become familiar with online collaborative environments	Familiar with Online Collaborative Platform

The parallel coordinate chart below shows that users generally deem Wikipedia user friendly and helpful in stimulating curiosity as well as entertaining in editing it. But it is considered not easy to add and edit information in Wikipedia. It also shows that the faculty members don’t cite Wikipedia frequently in their academic papers, especially in Law & Politics domain although they do express the importance of sharing academic contents in open platforms. This might be explained by QU4 index which indicates the quality of Wikipedia content in the area of expertise. Specifically, Wikipedia for Law & Politics and Health Sciences related contents are perceived to be lower quality than other educational resources as compared to other domains, such as Sciences and Engineering & Architecture.

How and which areas do faculty members use Wikipedia for?

Group 2 likert scales measure in which area the 2 university faculty members use Wikipedia and whether they contribute to the online platforms including Wikipedia.
The 2nd parallel coordinate chart below illustrates the total score for each of these metrics.

Likert Scale	Survey Items	Label
Use behaviour	USE1: I use Wikipedia to develop my teaching materials	Teaching Materials
	USE2: I use Wikipedia as a platform to develop educational activities with students	Educational Activities
	USE3: I recommend my students to use Wikipedia	Recommend to Students
	USE4: I recommend my colleagues to use Wikipedia	Recommend to Colleagues
	USE5: I agree my students use Wikipedia in my courses	Agree Students to Use
Profile 2.0	PF1: I contribute to blogs	Blogs
	PF2: I actively participate in social networks	Social Networks
	PF3: I publish academic content in open platforms	Open Platforms
Job relevance	JR1: My university promotes the use of open collaborative environments in the Internet	University Promotes
	JR2: My university considers the use of open collaborative environments in the Internet as a teaching merit	Teaching Merit
Behavioral intention	BI1: In the future I will recommend the use of Wikipedia to my colleagues and students	Tend to Recommend
	BI2: In the future I will use Wikipedia in my teaching activity	Tend to Use
Incentives	INC1: To design educational activities using Wikipedia, it would be helpful: a best practices guide	Practices Guide
	INC2: To design educational activities using Wikipedia, it would be helpful: getting instruction from a colleague	Colleague Instruction
	INC3: To design educational activities using Wikipedia, it would be helpful: getting specific training	Specific Training
	INC4: To design educational activities using Wikipedia, it would be helpful: greater institutional recognition	Institutional Recognition
Experience	EXP1: I consult Wikipedia for issues related to my field of expertise	Own Field of Expertise
	EXP2: I consult Wikipedia for other academic related issues	Other Academic Issues
	EXP3: I consult Wikipedia for personal issues	Personal
	EXP4: I contribute to Wikipedia (editions, revisions, articles improvement...)	Contribute
	EXP5: I use wikis to work with my students	Teaching

It is interesting to note that although the universities do promote to use open collaborative environments in the Internet, it is however not recognized as teaching merit.
Teachers agree students to use Wikipedia in their courses. But it does not show they are willing to recommend as well as practice in their teaching activities. Wikipedia is used more often for other academic related issues and personal issues than their own field of expertise. As a result, it shows very low interest among the faculty members to contribute to Wikipedia.

How does users’ perception affect the user behaviour?

To answer this question, 5 measurement scales are selected, i.e. Use Behaviour, Perceived Usefulness, Quality, Perceived Enjoyment and Perceived Ease of Use to analyse their relationship between Behavioral Intention. The reason to select these measurements is because they directly reflect users’ perception on how usefulness of Wikipedia. As a result they will affect their intention to use or recommend Wikipedia to other colleagues and students in the future.

From the chart above, it is observed that Use Behaviour has a higher correlation with Behavioral Intention at R-Squared = 0.65 whereas Perceived Ease of Use has the least correlation with Behavioral Intention at R-Squared=0.06.

Visualisation Software

To compare with Tableau, I've explored Qlik Sense and Power BI. It is found out that Qlik Sense is not intuitive for new user and less powerful in processing data as compared with Tableau. Power BI has both online and desktop version. As a product of Microsoft, it is well integrated with Excel. It also allows users to publish their visual analysis online. However as compared with Tableau, it also lack of the flexibility to manipulate the data.

Dashboard 1	Dashboard 2
The first dashboard as shown below is to give the overall picture of the survey outcome by university, domain and participants profiles.	In the 2nd dashboard, details of the measurement metrics are examed to understand the underlying perception of the survey participants.