Wiki surveys or wikisurveys are a

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

-based

survey Survey may refer to: Statistics and human research * Statistical survey, a method for collecting quantitative information about items in a population * Survey (human research), including opinion polls Spatial measurement * Surveying, the techniq ...

method with similarity to how

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

s evolve through

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

. In essence, they are surveys that allow participants to create the questions that are being asked. As participants engage in the survey they can either vote on a survey question or create a survey question. A single open-ended prompt written by the creator of the survey determines the topic the questions should be on. The first known implementation of a wiki survey was in 2010, and they have been used since then for a variety of purposes such as facilitating

deliberative democracy Deliberative democracy or discursive democracy is a form of democracy in which deliberation is central to decision-making. It adopts elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule. Deliberative democracy differs from traditional ...

, crowdsourcing opinions from experts and figuring out common beliefs on a given topic. A notable usage of wiki surveys is in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

's government system, where citizens can participate in crowdsourced lawmaking through Polis wiki surveys. Wiki surveys facilitate

collective intelligence Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, politic ...

by allowing users to both contribute and respond to the survey, as well as see the results of the survey in real time. They can be seen in a more general sense as a tool for establishing consensus in large volumes of people. Wiki surveys mainly differ from consensus-building in comment sections by using a

heuristic A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...

which determines the order of questions for each participant that aims to maximize consensus, not allowing replies to questions and providing visualization tools to better understand consensus.

Implementations

All Our Ideas

All Our Ideas was the first ever wiki survey. Its focus is on ranking the favorability of each 'item' that users submit to the survey. Each question presented asks the participant to rank the best of two items. At any point in time, participants can view a ranking of the items in order of their score. The score for an item is the estimated probability that it would be favored over another randomly chosen item. In this sense, it is considered a 'pairwise wiki survey'. The code for All Our Ideas is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Polis

Polis (also known as Pol.is) was developed in 2012. The focus of Polis is to project participants into an 'opinion space' where they can see how their voting behavior compares to other participants. The opinion space clusters participants into groups of similar opinion and is designed in a way to avoid

tyranny of the majority The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. This results in oppres ...

by being able to include groups that have small numbers of participants. The questions participants are presented with are a simple agree/disagree/pass on a single 'comment' submitted by a participant. The code for Polis is

Examples

PlaNYC PlaNYC was a strategic plan released by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2007 to prepare the city for one million more residents, strengthen the economy, combat climate change, and enhance the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The plan ...

used All Our Ideas to gather ideas on how to establish New York City's sustainability plan * vTaiwan, a citizen-lead government process in Taiwan, uses Polis for enabling large amounts of citizens to deliberate and consequently provide input on Taiwan's legislative decisions *

OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; french: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, ''OCDE'') is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate e ...

used All Our Ideas to gather ideas from the public prior to meeting for a forum and meeting on which skills are most important to invest in for the 21st century * March On, an offshoot of the Women's March Movement, used Polis to understand the opinions of people wanting to support the movement *

AARP AARP (formerly called the American Association of Retired Persons) is an interest group in the United States focusing on issues affecting those over the age of fifty. The organization said it had more than 38 million members in 2018. The magazin ...

used All Our Ideas to better understand the concerns its members have about acquiring and using

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

regarding people's health and wellness *

Bowling Green A bowling green is a finely laid, close-mown and rolled stretch of turf for playing the game of bowls. Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding of Thrupp, near Stroud, UK, invented the lawnmower, lawns were often kept cropped by grazing sheep on ...

used Polis to host a virtual town hall for its residents to better inform its community leaders on how to improve the quality of life of its residents * Residents of

Harrogate Harrogate ( ) is a spa town and the administrative centre of the Borough of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the town is a tourist destination and its visitor at ...

use Polis to debate issues in their community, with the results being released publicly to everyone

Characteristics

Wiki surveys have the following three defining characteristics:

Collaborativeness

Wiki surveys allow participants to contribute questions, as well as answer questions created by its participants.

Adaptivity

Wiki surveys adapt to elicit the most useful information from its participants. This is done by changing the ordering of questions based on the voting behavior of previous participants so as to maximize consensus. The heuristic determining the ordering of questions highly values showing the comments that have been voted on the least.

Greediness

Although being greedy typically has a negative connotation, it is used in a positive manner for wiki surveys. They are 'greedy' because they make full use of information that participants are willing to provide. Wiki surveys do not require participants to answer a fixed amount of questions, participants can answer as little or as much as they want.

Traditional survey methods vs. wiki surveys

Advantages of wiki surveys

Questions in traditional survey methods fall into two categories: Open and closed questions. Open questions ask the person taking the survey to write an open response while closed questions give a fixed set of responses to select from. Wiki surveys are like a hybrid of the two, enabling insightful consensus in certain situations where traditional survey methods may lack. Closed questions are easy to analyze quantitively, but the limited options to select from for a given question may cause bias. Open questions are not as subject to bias, but are difficult to analyze quantitatively at scale. Wiki surveys allow for open responses by the users' contribution of survey questions (also called 'items'), and uses machine learning techniques to automatically quantitative analyze the responses to those questions. The 'greediness' characteristic of wiki surveys is thought to also be advantageous, as it allows for gathering more data per participant. Data from real-world usage of wiki surveys shows that there are a relatively small amount of participants that answer a relatively large amount of questions compared to most participants. In traditional surveys, participants who want to provide more information than required are typically not allowed to do so, thus missing out on potentially useful information.

Disadvantages of wiki surveys

Traditional survey methods are better suited for situations where the survey creator(s) need to acquire consensus on a specific question or set of questions. Wiki surveys are more seen as a method for deliberation and gathering consensus on ideas that were not thought of by the survey creator(s). There is also a lack of research on determining potential biases that wiki surveys may cause.

References

{{reflist Survey methodology Wikis