Forwarded for Piotrus:
Help needed with posting to wikitech-l
I have a serious case of gremlins - tried several ways of posting to that list for a week and nothing works. Sigh. I see you are one of the contributors to that mailing list: could I ask you to repost my letter? It can be copy&pasted easily from User:Piotrus/Sandbox#letter.-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 18:29, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello guys,
The General User Survey project (survey of Wikipedia users, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey) is in dire need of somebody who would help us with the coding part - the questions for the survey have been mostly ready for months, but we cannot implement the survey with our (lack of) technical skills.
It was suggested (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Researching_Wikipedia) that our close-to-2-years (!) delay in getting General User Survey project up and running is due to researchers discussing the issue among themselves on a forum nobody else reads (i.e. Wiki-research-l) - so I am bringing the issue here.
Finishing the GUS project would give us not only a better theoretical understanding of ourselves (demographics, motivations, etc.) but also generate reliable practical information on how Wikimedia software and procedures are valued by the users.
Thank you for your help,
PS. I've tried sending this message to the list few days ago but I am pretty sure it got eaten by some net bug along the way, so I am trying it again. I apologize if it anybody receives it the second time.
PS2. Just recently another interesting research project did cross a milestone: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiXRay
-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus
David Gerard wrote: <snip>
The General User Survey project (survey of Wikipedia users, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey) is in dire need of somebody who would help us with the coding part - the questions for the survey have been mostly ready for months, but we cannot implement the survey with our (lack of) technical skills.
<snip history stuff>
Hello,
Basicly this project seems to be yet another survey. There are probably ton of softwares to create surveys, analyze the data for you and output cool looking histograms.
Since I am lazy, I relied on google with the keywords "php survey". The really first link is a link too google answer giving ton of links:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=311751
The first link gives out "PHP Questionnaire" (french word for "survey"): http://www.chumpsoft.com/products/phpq/ . The screen shots look cool, but the software comes at a price 200US$ (that's less than the price of half a day of work).
Another one is NaboPoll : http://www.nabocorp.com/nabopoll/shots.php . Looks simple enough, can probably be easily skinned to looks like wikipedia website.
Hmm lets google for "Mediawiki poll" and we have an extension to add polls in MediaWiki :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll from there we get straight to some source code: http://nl.free2xs.net/Projects/MediaWiki/extensions/Poll http://wikipoll.free.fr/mediawiki-1.6.5/index.php?title=Source_code
So now devs can have a look at both extensions, check the licence, contact the authors and add the extension in SVN. Then we all work on the issue, produce a clean and secure extension and deploy it on wikimedia.org or somewhere else.
I am sure we can do it by March 2007.
cheers,
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org