[WikiEN-l] Worst. Survey. Ever.

[Erik Moeller]

2008/11/1 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> You don't need someone that's good at designing surveys (well you do,
> but not to spot most of these problems), you just need to try the
> survey out on a few people first.

The survey was tried out on a group of testers and translators. You
only get so much useful feedback - the feedback that we're getting
from actually running the survey is much more detailed and valuable
for future surveys.

> I was under the impression it was done with the support of experts -
> if that's the case, pick better experts next time!

It was developed by the UNU-Merit Collaborative Creativity Group, who
have developed and run in-depth, multilingual surveys on the free
software movement, probably one of the most comparable specialized
communities. It's a first run, and the results will be imperfect and
need to be interpreted very carefully -- but we'll get some basic,
useful data, and we have a huge amount of feedback that will help with
the design of future surveys. I don't think we could have done much
better, especially given that the only resources we spent on this
project are staff time to shepherd it.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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