User:Mbeychok/Archived survey
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I am a retired engineer and I have been surprised, to say the least, at the poor quality of many of the engineering and technical articles on the Wikipedia, so I undertook an informal survey. Last week, there were 54 names listed under the Category:Engineer Wikipedians and I posted a questionnaire on each of their User Discussion pages asking them the following questions:
- Are you a graduate engineer?
- If so, in what engineering discipline did you receive a degree?
- In what year did you receive your degree?
I received responses from about 24 of them. I also studied the user pages of those who did not respond. This is a summary of the information that I managed to gather:
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- 29 of the 54 have engineering degrees
- 6 of the 54 are still undergraduates without degrees
- 19 of the 54 did not respond and had little or none of the requested information on their user pages
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- 2 have Chemical engineering degrees
- 2 have Mechanical engineering degrees
- 8 have Civil engineering degrees
- 2 have Aerospace engineering degrees (or working in an Aerospace company with a different engineering degree)
- 9 have Electrical or Electronic engineering degrees
- 6 had other engineering degrees (Computer Science engineering, for example)
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- 7 graduated over 10 years ago
- 4 others graduated over 5 years ago
- 3 are still in university as post-graduate students
- 15 graduated less than 5 years ago or did not provide their graduation date
Please note that only about 11 of the 54 listed in the Category:Engineer Wikipedians appears to have over 5 years of work experience since they got their degree. Most older engineers believe that it takes at least 5 years of work experience before a graduate engineer is truly an experienced engineer. From that viewpoint, even if my above data are 100% in error, it is obviously apparent that Wikipedia has a real problem with attracting experienced engineers to participate ... and that probably explains why the quality of the engineering and technological articles is so very poor.
