[Foundation-l] Surveys

Mon Oct 1 04:04:41 UTC 2007

On 9/29/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net > wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> Has any type of survey of individual Community Members ever been taken on
> any online Foundation project?
>
> If there has, what were the mechanics involved in taking it? If not, would
> conducting such a survey be possible?
>
> I am somewhat computer-challenged, so please be gentle :-).
>
> Marc Riddell

* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_survey for an idea which
has long been in the works, but never completed;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey is a discussion of a
possible general user survey, with recent updates

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research for a fuller listing of people who
are interested in research, including lots of people who have done or want
to do small qualitative surveys

There are all sorts of problems with doing a proper quantitative survey,
ranging from getting a good sample to preserving privacy; doing a
qualitative survey is easier, but that also of course has problems. However,
I think the data from a good survey would be very interesting to lots of
people.

If anyone is interested in doing research, the pages above and the
wiki-research-l list are good places to start; the list is low-traffic and
can be found here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Marc, you might also be interested in the community wikiproject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Community
if you don't already know about it.

-- phoebe