Hi Craig,
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Craig Franklin
<cfranklin(a)halonetwork.net> wrote:
In addition to Risker's comments, which I agree with 100%, I would further
request that any future survey of users be designed and supervised only by
someone with extensive expertise and experience in the field of survey
methodology. Many previous surveys that have been done by the Foundation
have, despite a lot of hard work and effort put into them, suffered from
methodological flaws, either in the form of the questions asked or the way
that the user sample was selected. The results have therefore not only
been useless in some cases, but in some cases actually misleading and thus
potentially damaging to the movement.
Agree about the importance of careful survey design. But, without
revisiting the dispute about the question in previous editor surveys
that asked Wikimedians to rate the performance of Wikimedia chapters,
which I know well you had concerns about, let me point out that the
Foundation's 2011 reader survey and the two 2011 editor surveys (whose
questionnaires and methodology were largely reused in the 2012 editor
survey) were designed and supervised by a PhD with extensive
experience in quantitative and qualitative research, who had been
conducting surveys in several countries even before she joined WMF. Of
course that doesn't mean that the questionnaire and methodology can't
be criticized or improved in each case - I recall that community
feedback about specific issues led to various improvements - , just
wanted to set the record straight.
This is something that the Foundation has gotten better at over the years,
and since we're on the topic it's something I'd like them to stick to!
Thanks, and please do continue to hold WMF to high standards ;)
Cheers,
Craig
On 13 March 2014 21:32, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 13 March 2014 05:13, James Salsman
<jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Is there
... an explanation which explains what it all means?
It's an attempted improvement on the policy survey at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Survey
"A survey about the importance of various policy issues ... given the
highest priority by our community."
If you are having trouble working the preference ballot at
http://demochoice.org/dcballot.php?poll=wmfcsdraft
then please try the demonstration, instructions, and background
material at
http://demochoice.org/
The ranked-preference ballot makes respondents consider choices
pairwise, which has an accuracy advantage over approval (yes or no to
each) or Likert scale (e.g. 1 "strongly agree" to 5 "strongly
disagree") responses when respondents are not familiar with all the
options. Approval on an issues survey can have problems with
relatively disproportionate numbers of responses with only a few
options or all or almost all options selected, and the Likert scale
gets fewer responses on issues less familiar to respondents than
ranking.
Best regards,
James
_______________________________________________
I don't think this would be a very useful survey, and I would not
participate in it. The shopping list of causes - many of which have little
or no correlation with anything even vaguely related to the operation of
the WMF, its core philosophies, or its purpose - is very americo-centric.
Just as importantly, it says that 12 topics will be "elected". Elected for
what? Why 12 of them? What about if lots of people think one of these
topics is really important, but for different reasons?
Mostly, though....this just really feels like it is trying to take the
Wikimedia community down a path that has nothing to do with our core
objectives, and to turn us into just another advocacy group. I'm not
interested in that.
Risker/Anne
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--
Tilman Bayer
Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB