On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:
But a dark threat loomed over the land. With one product using SurveyMonkey,
other products seemed poised to use it, too [1]. The compromise built
upon the premise that Media Viewer needed a survey in less time than it
would take to find and set up a free [2] solution was beginning to bleed
over into other projects where no such time crunch was present.

Our heroes now reach out to their friends in other realms [3]. Is there
hope for freedom in the land of getting user feedback? Will MediaWiki
or the grander Wikimedia ecosystem soon have a survey tool that all projects
can use with minimal hassle?

This is a longstanding problem. TL;DR: there isn't a good existing survey tool that suits our architecture, and we honestly don't care enough about surveys to build one in-house. Possible exceptions include the tools for surveying built during the original Usability Initiative or built in to VisualEditor during the alpha releases. 

For other large surveys, like the annual user survey we used to run via CentralNotice banners,[1] we've also used a third party solution, Qualtrics. I think we still pay for it actually. SurveyMonkey is actually a much better system, since we don't necessarily have to pay for it, and it's easier to use for survey takers and creators. 

In the past, we experimented with hosting FOSS survey tools like LimeSurvey,[2] but as far as I know, it was disabled because ops identified security problems with it. Maybe this has been fixed upstream? A cursory search of GitHub and StackOverflow doesn't show many other usable, actively-developed options in terms of a PHP-based FOSS survey engine.[3]

In my view, we have much bigger pain points in gathering data, such as lack of a framework for A/B testing. Using SurveyMonkey is the least of our problems in gathering qualitative or quantitative data to make decisions with. 

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Surveys
2. https://github.com/LimeSurvey
3. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3648843/open-source-php-form-survey-engine

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager