I will start passing some of these things on to the programmer so he is at
least beginning to give it some serious thought. I am sure he would
welcome others to the effort.
As I mentioned to Erik (and others) this person is booked solid through
the end of September, and as with most coding efforts it's running late.
I'm guessing that serious work may be delayed a couple of weeks into
October.
Kevin
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
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