Hi Tomasz
I wasn't aware of previous surveys to WLM participants, I was thinking of previous surveys of Wikipedians and Wikimedians. One key finding has been that people volunteer because they enjoy doing so, and that it is the most important motive for our community.
As for survey length, I wouldn't be too concerned about the length as long as the questions are interesting and relevant to the participants, and crucially they don't have to put the survey on hold and ask someone else before answering a particular question (I didn't spot such problems in your survey but generally the longer a survey the greater the risk that someone asks such a question).
WSC
(Note: this is a general answer to both Els's and WSC's comments.)
@Els: I think that this is a good idea to change the second answer
into the one you suggested, so I went ahead and did so (it now reads:
"I took the pictures between October 2011 and August 2012").
I also agree with your other suggestion (and I think it was also
brought up by Jane, too) of adding the willingness-to-share option, so
we now have 5 possible answers for Q9 (+ an "Other" option).
While preparing this survey, I've been reading some great survey tips
from a Harvard University researched, David S. Walonick, who suggested
that you should not present people with more than 5 choices for an
answer, because it makes the survey/questionnaire too long and boring
for the respondents, and I would like to stick to that suggestion. (It
was also he who suggested to include a confidentiality/anonimity
policy that I wrote down in the introduction.)
I am not sure how you know that "It was fun!" was a major motive that
people chose in our previous survey(s), because I can't remember the
2011 survey results ever being published publicly (due to us not
having the manpower to work on them). Perhaps you were talking about
different surveys that I don't know about?
I am also not sure if asking people questions about placing the images
on Wikipedia or using the Quality images process actually fits in the
scope of this survey; this is a hard-core Wikipedian's job, and I
doubt that the new users we try to reach with this survey even know
how to place an image into an article, or what a Quality image is.
Question Y is included in our survey as Q15, and as for Question Z, I
don't think that this survey is the right place to ask it. We might do
so, but I would very, very much like us to limit ourselves to 20
questions; the survey cannot be too long, and it's already much longer
than the one we used last year.
In any case, thanks a lot for your comments; I appreaciate them very much.
--
Tomasz W. Kozłowski
a.k.a. [[user:odder]]
_______________________________________________
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list
WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org