On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
There is an interesting tool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/User If anybody wants a truly random sample of Wikipedia users, that's a good way to do it.
Thats more than a slightly tedious process: The overwhelming majority of user accounts on the Enwp (and to a lesser extent on other large projects) are inactive/have no-non-deleted etc.
If a researcher wants a constrained sample of users such as "Users who have made more than 1 edit and who have edited in the past month" or whatever, they can ask anyone with a toolserver account to make them such a list.
Is asking for a survey spamming? That's a good question. If we could raise it on a community page and get a consensus that it is not, than we could potentially create a bot that could be fed a survey and would deliver it to x random users via the above page.
It might be useful to create a way for users to opt-out in bulk, I doubt many would do it, but it might help keep the few who would from becoming upset and going on a crusade after the "dreadful spammer".