Hello Tilman,
On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Delphine,
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
...
Still, I was aware that there had been some objections to that question by chapter representatives (which I don't assume have to do with the fact that respondents rated chapters' performance lower than that of other entities in the two previous surveys), and looked into these concerns while the present questionnaire was prepared; I also reached out to one of the critics in person at Wikimania. But I still haven't seen a compelling argument why the way the question is asked should be biased against chapters. The argument that the opinion of Wikimedians who live in countries without chapter should not count seems weak to me, e.g. because the projects that the work of chapters aims to support are international, and because the question asked about chapters in general, not one particular chapter.
That is not the argument I was trying to make (ie. voices of Wikimedians in a country without chapter don't count). Rather, there is a long list of things the Foundation does, where people are asked whether they knew about it, or not. And after that, right when people have been made aware of everything the Foundation does, they are asked to rate the work of the Foundation. The same question about the chapters comes after absolutely nothing has been said about chapter work, which, I believe, does introduce a bias. In short, people are being asked to rate something they *at this point in the survey* have an idea about (for the WMF) although they might have had no idea about it before starting the survey. All I'm asking is that we review the context in which this question is being asked so results make more sense.
OK, after some other people also remarked that preceding this question by other questions which conveyed quite some information about the Foundation's activities but not about the chapters' activities. we have now rearranged the questions so that this is no longer the case.
This is a bit of a compromise regarding the structuring of the questionnaire into sections, but fortunately it could be done without invalidating existing translations or changing the variables of the resulting dataset.
Thanks. I will not hide that I am still not sure whether we don't now have two "out of context questions" instead of just one, but I guess it's what we could do for this round, so thank you for doing this.
I sincerely hope that we can all together revisit this part of the survey to give results that can be used by all of us to increase satisfaction and performance in the future. Contrarily to Sue, I do think that these surveys (should) have a real-world impact and (should) keep us all on our toes, fine tuned to the critisicism, needs and wishes of the editors of the WIkimedia projects. As such I expect us to make sure that we do get as precise a picture as possible of what those are.
Best,
Delphine