On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Mark Holmquist mtraceur@member.fsf.org wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 11:56:58AM -0700, Leila Zia wrote:
Mark, If you haven't looked at Qualtrics in the past, check it out. It has many more options than SurveyMonkey that can make it worthwhile specially if we are already paying for it.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 10:34:21AM -0700, Mark Holmquist wrote:
free [2] [2] https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Qualtrics is no better, AFAICT from a cursory glance at their Wikipedia page and website.
See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs_talk:Evaluation_portal/Boiler_room#... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programs:Evaluation_portal/Shop/Qualtrics
Yes, it's of course a very proprietary solution, unfortunately. And especially for smaller surveys, it might be worth revisiting LimeSurvey, which appears to have undergone a complete rewrite since that installation was removed from WMF servers for security concerns around 2011.
That said, we also pay Qualtrics as a service and platform; any honest comparison with a free software tool will need to figure in the work of installing and running the software ourselves. On the other hand, an in-house installation would have privacy advantages (WMF staff: LCA has an office wiki page with survey requirements; I guess the Multimedia team has been relying on an existing, already approved contract).
As Leila says, Qualtrics offers many reporting options that can make one's life much easier. I should say that with the last editor survey, we encountered quite a few bugs, quirks and other issues with this and other Qualtrics features (some due to the size of the dataset). But that might be even worse with other tools, and Qualtrics also has a responsive tech support.
Another point is that Qualtrics appears to offer better multilingual support than other solutions - they even added extra interface languages for us (WMF) in 2011. SurveyMonkey still does not support RTL languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Qualtrics does, albeit with some quirks.
It appears that the Mediaviewer survey ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/Media_Viewer/Survey ) was run separately for different languages, instead of as one multilingual survey. Was this due to a lack of integrated language support in Surveymonkey, or just because the focus was on per-project results anyway?