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 :)