On 11/2/06, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:
Dear all
First, I'd like to enquire if there is any progress with the General
User Survey? Are there tasks for non-programmers to do? I think that we
can always benefit from discussion about the questions itself.
Second, I'd appreciate any suggestions as to where one may publish an
article about using wikis and Wikipedia as a teaching tool.
--
Best regards,
Piotr Konieczny
Thanks Piotr (and hello again :-))
Regarding the General User Survey, I'm not sure of what the status of
technical considerations is. But as to questions themselves, anyone
interested should go to
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey/Questionnaire> and
see if what you are interested in is covered, or whether the questions
there are phrased adequately. I think the _major_ other non-technical
detail which needs to be worked out is the issue of sampling - how are
we to ensure that this survey really does represent the "state of the
wiki" (as was the motivation to do so)? How are we to ensure that we
target newbies as well as seasoned wiki-editors? Or is this a survey
for relatively experienced Wikimedians? Or is it simply a
self-selected sample, where we take what we're "given"?
Regarding the essay on using Wikipedia in schools, I would be very
happy to see it on Wikiversity - though, since we haven't yet decided
on clear guidelines for what kind of research facilities Wikiversity
provides for (nor, obviously, have they been approved), I can't give
you a definitive answer on this. Where to put research has always been
an ambiguous question - I hope Wikiversity will address it to a decent
extent - and you're all more than welcome to help develop guidelines
or add comments at
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Research
and related pages.
Cheers,
Cormac