On 9/21/06, Erik Zachte erikzachte@infodisiac.com wrote:
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 :(
This depends on how many people are working on it. Have you heard further from Elan Pavlov?
3 Translation issues A Mediawiki wide survey needs to be held in many languages to reduce bias where opinions are asked.
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.
Quite right. Perhaps the initial survey can be a single page and concise, minimizing the cost of this step (It would still be an enjoyable 40-language project)
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.
Could this be coded by more than one person?
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.
:-) I'm thinking of 'quick' in terms of a very simple interface -- not something people need to see and play with to be able to guess at useful qustions! -- and a short set of basic Q's (as above, to minimize translation as well). A second pass not with more code functionality, but with more attention to the layout of the form, distribution of questions, promotion of the effort to minimize bias, &c.
SJ