Global Reach/Ghana Survey

Language

Since this was a voice phone survey, the 5 top languages in Ghana were presented to the respondents. Here is the distribution of the languages chosen.

Awareness of Wikipedia

During our travels to work with Wikipedia Zero partners, we noticed that many people we spoke with were completely unfamiliar with Wikipedia, despite having internet access. We were curious to quantify our anecdotal observations to understand how widespread this was.

Smartphones vs Feature phones

To avoid differences of interpretation of what exactly a smartphone is, we instead focused on whether their phone could possibly access the internet. This is the key differentiator between feature phones and smart phones, as well as identifying who might be able to access Wikipedia on the internet. We considered a 'don't know' response as probably not a smartphone.

Did they know Wikipedia was free on their network

For this pilot survey, we called MTN Ghana subscribers, who had free access to Wikipedia via Wikipedia Zero. We were interested if they were aware that Wikipedia was free for them.

How did Wikipedia Zero affect their use

For respondents who had heard of Wikipedia and knew that it was available for free, we asked them how that affected their Wikipedia use.

How they learned about Wikipedia

Of the respondents who had heard of Wikipedia, we asked how they had found out about it. One interesting point - the Wikipedia Zero promotions from our Ghana partner (MTN) was how 11% of the respondents learned of Wikipedia for the first time.

How often they use Wikipedia

We then asked the same respondents how often they use Wikipedia. We have clusters toward frequent usage and then around people who never use it.

How interested were the infrequent / non-users

For the respondents who said 'rarely' or 'never' to how often they use Wikipedia, we asked about their interest in Wikipedia. We wanted to see if people who didn't use it just didn't care, or wanted to but experienced some barrier

For infrequent / non-users, what was the biggest barrier

For the respondents who said 'rarely' or 'never' to how often they use Wikipedia, we asked what they felt the largest barrier was.

Gender

We were surprised by the ratio of male to female respondents. We asked a field researcher in Ghana about this, and found out that the males tend to own the mobile phones in the family.

Age

The results skew heavily to the 18-30 age group.

Location

The respondents categorized themselves as either Urban or Rural