That's correct, afaik that was the original motivation, along with some of the concerns that Lane/Nathan raised in the other list -- i.e. that it was difficult for contributors to tell if a survey was ethical, vetted, etc. Frankly, I think some long-term contributors just felt jaded -- for a while it seemed there were lots of surveys and studies to try to find out things that seemed intuitively obvious if you were a participant in the community. I think Heather is right that it seems like there have been fewer surveys in recent years, for whatever reason.

Part of the problem is a somewhat subtle demographic one: while contributors to Wikipedia do turn over, so newer contributors will not necessarily have seen lots of surveys, very heavy editors and admins (who are often easier to identify) tend to be long-term participants who might have been surveyed many times. Additionally, the people who follow mailing lists, social media, etc. (or at least the people who speak up on those channels) skew towards very-long-term contributors who have strong opinions and have seen it all before. So, if you advertise your survey on the mailing list, that's the population you get, and that's the feedback you get. (But it's a catch-22; there's not really other obvious mass channels).

Anyway, this is a hard problem without super-obvious solutions, and not one that there's a lot of models for -- very few online projects are simultaneously as open with their data and as interesting for research purposes!

best,
Phoebe