A number of Wikipedians have advocated for a user survey for a very long time. Erik Zachte has been the most vocal and persistent. Realizing a user survey was one of the top items on the agenda of the Wikimedia research network before it stopped holding meetings. It has been the subject of long debates and conversations on IRC, has come up this summer in Special Projects Committee discussions, and has been the bugbear of dozens of student and professorial research projects.
Today I attended the wrapup discussion of a three-day conference on open content and public broadcasting, with gathered luminaries from WGBH, PBS, the Hewlett Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Yale law school, the Federation of American Scientists, and so forth. Of great relevance to them : good information on the demographics of Wikipedians, segmented by activity in various areas of the community and the projects. Are we dominated by people with no full-time jobs and no children? The question was not posed to me, but I could not have answered with certainty.
Noone outside of the projects can run a survey that ties reliably to user login authentication. Important sociology and technology projects going on every month, talks given by Wikipedians and Wikimedians every week, and literally thousands of third parties making decisions about communities and creativity, wish they could be informed by the results of such surveys.
With a brief discussion about preserving privacy in aggregate data, randomizing test and control samples, and a tweak to allow web forms on pages that are aware of your wikipedia userid, we could have a simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to optimize future iterations.
The latest discussions on meta are here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_User_Survey
I recall other pages on en:wp and other language wp's that are not currently linked from there; if you were part of one of those efforts, please add a link to your work.
SJ
-- ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month. Nice. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll
(thread 2 in a 3-thread microseries. see also http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010247.html )