Amgine wrote:
... can you suggest a reasonable methodology for sampling and weighting the diverse communities which make up the WMF's projects, donors, and non-active readers?
Select them at random and send them an email. I know from experience that inactive admins respond at about a 15% response rate, so it would be easy to get a statistically significant number of editors to respond. Recent donors respond at a greater rate.
(I doubt that the Foundation should try to survey readers who do not edit about advocacy actions, because I don't think there should be actions on behalf of the reader-only community. Having said that, I think the Foundation most certainly should be taking actions in support of the broad editor community, not just Foundation staff.)
As someone occasionally involved in population research, there are a number of questions I would have about learning the community's expectations regarding frequency of actions, including what instrument would be used, where/how it was normed, and the reasoning suggesting the instrument would have sufficient validity and reliability, as well as sensitivity and specificity, when applied to WMF communities.
What questions, in particular?
I'm growing increasingly concerned that there is a whole class of information that Foundation staff will actively try to prevent learning, especially when the answers might be embarrassing. At first I thought it was isolated to the proportion of impoverished long-term volunteers. The reactions to my survey attempting to determine the answer were positively shameful, including repeated false allegations by Foundation staff that I had violated policies including one that they knew had never been approved. But now I'm not so sure it is isolated: The Foundation apparently does not want to know the opinion of donors and the community as to whether staff should be paid competitive salaries (my preliminary survey suggest that those opinions are very much opposed to the status quo) and now it seems there is no interest in determining how offen the community thinks advocacy actions should occur.
It would not take very much time, effort, or money to learn the answers to these questions. Who would have thought that the Foundation would be opposed to finding them?
Sincerely, James Salsman