  In the social sciences, there is a longstanding tension between data
collection methods that facilitate quantification and those that are open to
unanticipated information. Advances in technology now enable new, hybrid
methods that combine some of the benefits of both approaches. Drawing
inspiration from online information aggregation systems like Wikipedia and from
traditional survey research, we propose a new class of research instruments
called wiki surveys. Just as Wikipedia evolves over time based on contributions
from participants, we envision an evolving survey driven by contributions from
respondents. We develop three general principles that underlie wiki surveys:
they should be greedy, collaborative, and adaptive. Building on these
principles, we develop methods for data collection and data analysis for one
type of wiki survey, a pairwise wiki survey. Using two proof-of-concept case
studies involving our free and open-source website www.allourideas.org, we show
that pairwise wiki surveys can yield insights that would be difficult to obtain
with other methods.
