On 9/21/06, Erik Zachte <erikzachte(a)infodisiac.com> wrote:
SJ:
With a brief discussion about preserving privacy
in aggregate data,
randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms
on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a
simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this
a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
optimize future iterations.
The latest discussions on meta are here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey
SJ, great to hear you welcome the survey. After Wikimania 2005 the project
fell idle,
because I had too many other WM obligations and a not so good winter
healthwise.
Wikimania 2006 gave the project new elan and now someone else will code it.
Status:
Technical design has started but needs some more work:
I'll make a mockup input script for the form generator.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey/Implementation
Programming will start in a reasonable time frame, see Kevin's earlier post.
I'm not so sure this takes only one month :(
This depends on how many people are working on it. Have you heard
further from Elan Pavlov?
3 Translation issues
A Mediawiki wide survey needs to be held in many languages to reduce bias
where opinions are asked.
Because of 3 a survey form needs to be built
dynamically.
No English/German/Japanese/etc texts intermingled with PHP script.
That would be a maintenance nightmare.
Quite right. Perhaps the initial survey can be a single page and
concise, minimizing the cost of this step (It would still be an
enjoyable 40-language project)
Depending on how much time the programmer can spend on
the project, we could
probably show an alpha version about 4 weeks after he starts.
Could this be coded by more than one person?
Please don't ask for quick hacks. I know all this
sounds like an invitation
for some self-proclaimed code magician to make something barely functional
in a weekend, pronounce the job done and then leave the 'dirty details'
(usually 80% of what needs to be done) for others to clean up. I'd rather
see to it that the first version is usable and a good platform for future
reuse and extension.
:-) I'm thinking of 'quick' in terms of a very simple interface --
not something people need to see and play with to be able to guess at
useful qustions! -- and a short set of basic Q's (as above, to
minimize translation as well). A second pass not with more code
functionality, but with more attention to the layout of the form,
distribution of questions, promotion of the effort to minimize bias,
&c.
SJ