Hi Craig,
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 4:42 AM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
In addition to Risker's comments, which I agree with 100%, I would further request that any future survey of users be designed and supervised only by someone with extensive expertise and experience in the field of survey methodology. Many previous surveys that have been done by the Foundation have, despite a lot of hard work and effort put into them, suffered from methodological flaws, either in the form of the questions asked or the way that the user sample was selected. The results have therefore not only been useless in some cases, but in some cases actually misleading and thus potentially damaging to the movement.
Agree about the importance of careful survey design. But, without revisiting the dispute about the question in previous editor surveys that asked Wikimedians to rate the performance of Wikimedia chapters, which I know well you had concerns about, let me point out that the Foundation's 2011 reader survey and the two 2011 editor surveys (whose questionnaires and methodology were largely reused in the 2012 editor survey) were designed and supervised by a PhD with extensive experience in quantitative and qualitative research, who had been conducting surveys in several countries even before she joined WMF. Of course that doesn't mean that the questionnaire and methodology can't be criticized or improved in each case - I recall that community feedback about specific issues led to various improvements - , just wanted to set the record straight.
This is something that the Foundation has gotten better at over the years, and since we're on the topic it's something I'd like them to stick to!
Thanks, and please do continue to hold WMF to high standards ;)
Cheers, Craig
On 13 March 2014 21:32, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 13 March 2014 05:13, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Is there ... an explanation which explains what it all means?
It's an attempted improvement on the policy survey at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EU_policy/Survey
"A survey about the importance of various policy issues ... given the highest priority by our community."
If you are having trouble working the preference ballot at http://demochoice.org/dcballot.php?poll=wmfcsdraft then please try the demonstration, instructions, and background material at http://demochoice.org/
The ranked-preference ballot makes respondents consider choices pairwise, which has an accuracy advantage over approval (yes or no to each) or Likert scale (e.g. 1 "strongly agree" to 5 "strongly disagree") responses when respondents are not familiar with all the options. Approval on an issues survey can have problems with relatively disproportionate numbers of responses with only a few options or all or almost all options selected, and the Likert scale gets fewer responses on issues less familiar to respondents than ranking.
Best regards, James
I don't think this would be a very useful survey, and I would not participate in it. The shopping list of causes - many of which have little or no correlation with anything even vaguely related to the operation of the WMF, its core philosophies, or its purpose - is very americo-centric. Just as importantly, it says that 12 topics will be "elected". Elected for what? Why 12 of them? What about if lots of people think one of these topics is really important, but for different reasons?
Mostly, though....this just really feels like it is trying to take the Wikimedia community down a path that has nothing to do with our core objectives, and to turn us into just another advocacy group. I'm not interested in that.
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