On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon(a)post.pl> wrote:
There is an interesting tool:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User
If anybody wants a truly random sample of Wikipedia users, that's a good
way to do it.
Thats more than a slightly tedious process: The overwhelming majority
of user accounts on the Enwp (and to a lesser extent on other large
projects) are inactive/have no-non-deleted etc.
If a researcher wants a constrained sample of users such as "Users who
have made more than 1 edit and who have edited in the past month" or
whatever, they can ask anyone with a toolserver account to make them
such a list.
Is asking for a survey spamming? That's a good
question. If we could
raise it on a community page and get a consensus that it is not, than we
could potentially create a bot that could be fed a survey and would
deliver it to x random users via the above page.
It might be useful to create a way for users to opt-out in bulk, I
doubt many would do it, but it might help keep the few who would from
becoming upset and going on a crusade after the "dreadful spammer".