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 :)