Social:Wikisurvey

Wikisurveys or Wiki Surveys are a survey method that draws inspiration from the way Wikipedia pages are crowdsourced and evolve. 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. The first known implementation of a Wikisurvey was in 2010, and they have been used since then for a variety of purposes such as governance, global policy and crowdsourcing opinions from experts. One of the most notable usages of Wikisurveys is in Taiwan’s government system, where citizens can participate in crowdsourced law making.

Questions in traditional survey methods fall into 2 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. Wikisurveys are like a hybrid of the two, enabling insightful consensus in certain situations where traditional survey methods may lack. Respondents are allowed to both create and answer survey questions, based on a single open-ended prompt that initiates the survey. The ability to both contribute and respond to the survey facilitates a collective intelligence. Wikisurveys mainly differ from consensus building in comment sections typically seen on websites such as Reddit and Youtube by presenting questions to each participant in a random or pseudo-random order, not allowing replying to questions and providing better visualization tools for participants to understand the current consensus while taking the survey.