On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Amgine amgine@wikimedians.ca wrote:
On 17/02/13 09:18 PM, James Salsman wrote:
I've been working as a professional statistician for most of the past two decades, in applied fields where problems result in immediate failures of various algorithms. These opinion questions aren't sophisticated. People will answer when they are asked. What do you think makes sampling so difficult, in the case, for instance, of how often advocacy actions should be proposed?
Well, as a simple issue of weighting, should geographic weighting be applied based on size of a given language speaking population? e.g. Should the sample of English speaking respondents from India be relevant to the region's weight in English as a language, it's population as a portion of humanity, its estimated online population, or some other global-relative weighting?
No, randomly selecting editors with email registered from those who have edited on any project a certain number of times in the past month, say five times to use one of the Foundation's definitions for active editors, and asking them their opinion in their primary language as determined by the project they have edited most frequently over that period, will result in an answer which reflects the geographic distribution of the editor community.
Or how about projects: are all project populations to be the same size?
No, but their number of active editors reflects the proportion in which the Foundation should reasonably weight their editors' opinions of, in this instance, how often advocacy actions should take place.
I'd be very interested in what field you are a professional statistician; my area is health sciences, particularly public health.
My most recent professional publication is https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B73LgocyHQnfS0g5ZEw1aFNKT2s/edit but the bulk of my income over the past year has been from work done for commodities futures traders.