A handful of students in a class I teach hadn't realized that the Wikipedia
was 1) user written, 2) editable, or 3) discussable. They never even tried
the tabs at the top, so a student put the question to me in class today:
how many of those that access a page access its discussion page? On
#wikipedia folks noted that such a feature is possible with Wikimedia but
disabled and any such statistics are hard to get since there's so much and
can hurt performance if enabled.
Any other thoughts?
SJ:
> With a brief discussion about preserving privacy in aggregate data,
> randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms
> on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a
> simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this
> a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
> optimize future iterations.
>
> The latest discussions on meta are here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey
>
SJ, great to hear you welcome the survey. After Wikimania 2005 the project
fell idle,
because I had too many other WM obligations and a not so good winter
healthwise.
Wikimania 2006 gave the project new elan and now someone else will code it.
Status:
Technical design has started but needs some more work:
I'll make a mockup input script for the form generator.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey/Implementation
Programming will start in a reasonable time frame, see Kevin's earlier post.
I'm not so sure this takes only one month :(
Major issues:
1 Authentication
Best after single login is active, in a few weeks time?
2 Anonimisation of results
May need some more thinking, this is sensitive matter
We had a heated debate about this in Frankfurt, we'll probably get into
this further
when we have a proof of concept, and more people show up to give feedback.
3 Translation issues
A Mediawiki wide survey needs to be held in many languages to reduce bias
where opinions are asked.
4 Results should be script-processable, e.g. no free format feedback.
Thus all answers should be on a numeric scale or predefined
(e.g. country numbers instead of country names in all esoteric languages
that no script can handle)
Because of 3 a survey form needs to be built dynamically.
No English/German/Japanese/etc texts intermingled with PHP script.
That would be a maintenance nightmare.
Depending on how much time the programmer can spend on the project, we could
probably show an alpha version about 4 weeks after he starts.
Then start major discussion on final questions (this will work better when
people see a alpha version to play with),
and finally freeze questions and invite translators.
I would be happy if we did a major survey in November/December.
Please don't ask for quick hacks. I know all this sounds like an invitation
for some self-proclaimed code magician to make something barely functional
in a weekend, pronounce the job done and then leave the 'dirty details'
(usually 80% of what needs to be done) for others to clean up. I'd rather
see to it that the first version is usable and a good platform for future
reuse and extension.
Erik Zachte :)
Hey everyone,
I was wondering if you could help me with downloading a single article (a
xml dump) with ALL its history and the discussion page as the export
function is not enough (only up to 100 revisions).
Also and related, does any of you use the History Flow Visualization tool?
It gives me some kind of error: "java.io.IOException: Not in GZIP Format"
and there are no help files (openable at least) to learn what to do.
Looking forward to moving forward,
Best,
Rut
Reintroducing: phd student (cooperation in wikipedia) at the Center for
Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, University of Copenhagen.