I will start passing some of these things on to the programmer so he is at least beginning to give it some serious thought. I am sure he would welcome others to the effort.
As I mentioned to Erik (and others) this person is booked solid through the end of September, and as with most coding efforts it's running late. I'm guessing that serious work may be delayed a couple of weeks into October.
Kevin
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.
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