Affordance Perception Across Languages on Wikipedia
Understanding how Wikipedia editors shape collective memory across English and Arabic
I designed and led a mixed-methods study to explore how Wikipedia editors perceive and use the platform’s features (like hyperlinks, Talk Pages, and interlanguage links) to shape historical narratives about the Arab Spring.
Most research looks at what editors do. My work investigates how they think: how editors interpret their roles, engage with the platform’s affordances, and understand Wikipedia’s purpose across linguistic and cultural contexts.
Research Question:
How do cultural and linguistic contexts shape the way users perceive and use platform features and how can those insights guide more inclusive product and content design?
Business Impact
Provides insight for designing editor tools, moderation workflows, and cross-market UX structures by revealing gaps between intended affordances and actual user behavior
What I did (and am doing)
- Designed a bilingual survey (English & Arabic) distributed to 200 Wikipedia editors, capturing how they perceive platform tools, editorial norms, and Wikipedia’s role in preserving history.
- Conducted retrospective interviews where editors reflected on their own edits—discussing motivation, cultural context, and the norms guiding their actions.
- Linked self-reported perception data to behavioral traces to identify mismatches.
- Collaborated with Arabic-speaking researchers to ensure translation accuracy and cultural relevance in both survey and analysis.
- Identified cross-lingual differences in motivations, norms, and editorial patterns.
Why it matters
This research design brings together quantitative scale and qualitative depth to capture how users perceive and act through platform features across languages. By pairing bilingual surveys with retrospective interviews, I was able to connect what people say about their experiences to what they actually do on the platform.
The cross-lingual collaboration ensured cultural nuance and translation accuracy, strengthening both validity and inclusivity. This design approach not only surfaced hidden assumptions behind user behavior but also demonstrated how mixed methods can reveal actionable insights about affordance perception and cultural variation—insights that are often missed in single-language or single-method studies.