On 9 November 2012 17:22, Katherine Bavage <katherine.bavage(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote: What you're really doing there, though, is asking "How do you answer the question "What is your gender?"?" which is logically equivalent to just asking "What is your gender?". Including enough options that everyone will fall into one of the boxes (or at least "Other") is a good idea, but torturing the English language in an attempt to appear politically correct doesn't actually achieve anything!

On 09/11/2012 17:38, Thomas Dalton wrote: With respect, it's simply not a case of merely appearing as politically correct. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

On 9 November 2012 20:05, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote: Yes. In any case, a good general rule is: if someone says "politically correct", in the overwhelming majority of cases they're looking for an excuse to act like a massive dick. I'm sure there are exceptions, but that's the way to bet. - d.

Afternoon all, I'd always prefer to torture English than exclude anyone, but point taken! Tom (Morris) - as I said when we spoke yesterday - I'll get involved in the Meta discussions as I think they're a really valuable conversation to have across Chapters. I totally agree on matching the questions to ONS data questions were possible to improve direct comparison - having only realised this would have been a better approach after the survey closed when wanting to contextualise results in national averages :( As for the anonymity of the survey or not - I did answer these questions already on wiki ( http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMUK_membership_survey_-_suggestions_and_comme… ). As I said there, I'm happy to make lots of improvements, and certainly revisit the question of anonymous/non anonymous surveys. On the one hand, anonymity protects people when answering questions with sensitive personal data such as income or sexuality, and may ensure the results are more genuine. On the other, it can give people licence to give unconstructive or malicious responses which can skew results in small data sets. What we want is the maximum number of responses that genuinely reflect what people feel, without opening the survey up to potential abuse. There isn't a perfect solution with Survey Monkey, our survey service. An anonymous survey with a password protected link can still be accessed by non recipients if someone emailed them the link and password - generally not a likely scenario but possibly of concern. If we use Survey monkey to administer anonymously emailing recipients with unique links that cannot be used if the email is forwarded, we lose the details of the mailing from Civi CRM (although we can create a dummy activity log against people's records), it goes in a plain text email, rather than our own HTML template, which could decrease responses, and we can't follow up any questions that indicate people want to know more about a specific service or opportunity (such as wanting to do more editing). Conclusion: I shall think'pon this some more, ask around amongst colleagues in my field what they do and why for more insight, and of course, will start on-wiki discussions in good time prior to the next survey so we can all discuss pros and cons and help edit better questions. On balance, I'm inclined to think that we should aim for the next survey to be anonymous, if we can get gatekeeping against potential misuse right, and have an option for people to provide an email address if they're happy for their results to be followed up or shared. I'm particularly keen on the latter, as it would allow us to ask their permission to quote individual comments in publications, and allow us to email people with relevant follow up info. Thanks again for the thoughts! Katherine On 10 November 2012 08:39, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote: -- *Katherine Bavage * *Fundraising Manager * *Wikimedia UK* +44 20 7065 0949 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*

On 12/11/2012 13:31, Gordon Joly wrote: Who's going to do the anonymousing? When it happens in a job application (for a large enough company), the company (HR) still see the data, it's just that the persons making the hiring decision doesn't. KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

Don't worry about it. It was more an opportunity to make a joke about gay gas bills. Given that I found some other problems with the Wikipedia Editors Survey that the Foundation has been conducted, I've decided to pull together the best bits of various demographic survey guidance (from governments etc.) on Meta. That way the Foundation and Chapters and so on can just steal those rather than make up their own. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Survey_best_practices -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/>

On 09/11/2012 16:40, Tom Morris wrote: Personally, I would word it as "Do you identify as...?" or "What do you identified as your gender?". KTC -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine