Hello,
I'm part of a team at Carnegie Mellon University that is studying the Request for Adminship process and would like to run a survey on RfA voters. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to successfully solicit for users to take a survey without being intrusive? Any suggestions at all on conducting the survey within Wikipedia would be helpful.
Thank you,
Ben Collier
PhD Student
Carnegie Mellon University
Hi Ben,
sounds interesting for me. I am doing my Master Thesis in sociology. I try to "explain" the micro-level vote decisions in admin votes in the german Wikipedia based on quantitative data about there participation and interaction.
I don't know the "right way" how to survey in en.wikipedia, but I guess there are subsites of wikipedia where surveys are announced. Direct invitiations on many user pages will be sanctioned, as far as I know.
Greetings
Marc, Germany
Ben Collier wrote:
Hello,
I’m part of a team at Carnegie Mellon University that is studying the Request for Adminship process and would like to run a survey on RfA voters. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to successfully solicit for users to take a survey without being intrusive? Any suggestions at all on conducting the survey within Wikipedia would be helpful.
You can announce your survey in places like WP:VP, WP:AN or WP:RFAdmin talk. You could try framing your survey as a Request for Comments, but at least part of it would have to be public.
All of that is much easier if you are a Wikipedia contributor. The more active and estabilished you are, the more things you can do that a n00bie or IP could get warned/banned for...
You could try to enlist help from one of the estabilished editors/admins who are interested in such issues; NoSeptember comes to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:NoSeptember/The_NoSeptember_Admin_Project
There is no dedicated place for scholarly surveys, such proposals have been discussed but never gained enough interest to become a policy. Some time ago I've collected all known survey-related links at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Survey_(disambiguation) If I missed something, I hope that contributors of this list will add it there.
Do check the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Admin_survey
By the way, Ben, I am from Uni of Pitt, so if at some point you want to meet and chat f2f about researching Wikipedia, let me know :)
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org