[Foundation-l] Editor Survey, 2011

Fri Mar 11 00:43:11 UTC 2011

Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> Le jeudi 10 mars 2011 à 02:00 -0500, MZMcBride a écrit :
>> Apologies for the slew of questions. I skimmed the FAQ, but didn't see any
>> of these answered.
> 
> I've added some of these questions to the FAQ page; I cherry-picked
> those that I thought would be really "frequently asked", based on my
> personal experience with Wikimedians.
> 
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_survey_FAQ

Thank you for that. Do you know if there's a reason that Mani isn't able to
respond on this list? (I assume she can post here as it was her e-mail that
I replied to.)

I completely agree that some of my questions weren't of the "frequently
asked" nature, but some of them are very important, in my view. Given some
of the weighty subject matter (regarding user privacy, data retention,
etc.), the answers posted so far at the FAQ page have been pretty
lackluster.

> Questions I left out seemed to be (constructive) feedback rather than
> common questions, so they should probably go on the feedback page:
> 
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_survey_feedback

She asked that she be e-mailed with questions. I cc'd her on the original
e-mail. I'm not sure if it will make a difference, but I can post my
questions on that feedback page as well if you think that will help (I'll do
it in a minute).

After having looked at the survey content, the survey software, and the
survey format (particularly the length), I have very, very low confidence
that anything of value will come from this (beyond lessons of what not to do
next time).

The pool of people who will click the banner is already fairly small. The
people who will want to start a 20-minute survey is even smaller. The pool
of people who will be comfortable answering some of these questions when the
data usage/retention policies are so murky is even smaller. And the people
who will be able to bear LimeSurvey makes the pool even smaller. Even on the
scale of all logged-in users, we're talking about a very small pool of
people and not a particularly representative bunch, in my opinion. It
doesn't seem like many people are interested in discussing this, though, so
I guess we'll just wait and see what happens.

MZMcBride