On 5/27/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
You miss my point, I think. This is come chap using the name of a prestigious university to perform a "survey", even successfully exploiting the goodwill of Wikipedia editors to have information about this survey published on our mailing list. All we're told is that this is part of a "non-commercial cross-cultural research project" and we're supposed to go to a non-secure http site registered in Michigan (not, aas far as I'm aware, part of Israel) to fill it in. I wouldn't respond to a chap with a clipboard in the street who told me this. I'd laugh in his face. Who is he? Why won't Haifa university's servers do?
If you are insinuating that somehow my goodwill (didn't know I had any) has been exploited by someone in order to forward the survey request to the mailing list, you are mistaken. The invitation to take part in the survey has been on the Village Pump for at least 10 days, and nobody has made any objection there about the presence of the invitation. The invitation to the survey can be found at the following URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VP#Wikipedians_On-line_Questionnaire
Furthermore, the request to forward the information to the mailing list was sent to me (I presume) as a result of my role as mailing list administrator. In that situation, it is not my place to decide if the email should go to the mailing list, so long as the email is not spam and actually relates to Wikipedia. Whether people choose to participate in the survey is their own personal choice.
Personally, I feel that fresh data about Wikipedia users will be a good thing
~Mark Ryan