[Foundation-l] Editor Survey, 2011

[Dario Taraborelli]

Nikola, Amir,

let me answer your points as I am one of the people behind the expert
barriers survey. The design with two blocks of questions with a different
framing is intentional and is based on the results of a long pilot that we
ran for one month (Dec 2010-Jan 2011) prior to the official launch. If you
check what is asked at the top of each block, you'll see that we are
expecting participants to answer different types of questions (A: the
perception of factors affecting WP participation among one's peer; B: one's
individual agreement/disagreement with these statements about WP
participation; C: the relation between one's agreement/disagreement and
one's motivation to contribute). This is designed to allow you in principle
to give 3 different answers to A, B, C and that's precisely what we want to
test for.  The design is in no way meant to ask the same question twice just
for the sake of it or because we assume respondents are lazy or inaccurate,
but to help us turn anecdotes into data we can actually study. I am sorry to
hear this didn't work for you and others, the vast majority of respondents
seem to have correctly understood the assignment, and we had a quite amazing
response rate so far from experts, scholars and research students from a
broad range of disciplines. We also have a surprising gender and age balance
among participants and respondents are almost perfectly split into two
groups of people with previous experience as Wikipedia contributors and
people who never edited a single page.

Those of you interested in following the developments and the early results
of this study should keep an eye on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_involvement/2011_surveyor
get in touch for feedback or any other issue related to the survey at:
expert_barriers at nitens.org

Thanks,
Dario

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:05 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs>wrote:

> On 03/11/2011 10:52 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> > I noticed the "Take a WMF-sponsored survey on barriers to expert
> > participation in Wikipedia." banner on the top of English Wiktionary
> > the other day. I clicked it and answered a whole page of questions
> > that were interesting and relevant. And the next page presented the
> > same bunch of questions again, somewhat rephrased. I hate it when that
> > happens and i immediately closed the survey; my answers to the
>
> This is sometimes done so that if someone is not seriously answering the
> form, the answers to similar questions will be different, and so they
> may be disregarded. But yeah, experts are probably not going to not
> seriously answer the form.
>
> > relevant questions on the first page probably went to the drain.
>
> You could've just clicked 'Next' to the end.
>
>