[WikiEN-l] Worst. Survey. Ever.

[Erik Moeller]

2008/11/1 Judson Dunn <cohesion at sleepyhead.org>:
> It's probably fine as a university study that Wikimedia is helping
> with. Since we didn't spend much (if anything) on it, I wouldn't be
> too hard on it. If one question has good results that may be worth it.
> Even if we only get a relative ratio of people willing to take surveys
> or something.

Lol, I would expect some more useful data than that. So far the
statistics indicate that there are almost 80,000 submitted
questionnaires, out of a total of 130,000 who at least took the first
question. That's a pretty high submission rate.

Looking again through the questionnaire, here are some of the
questions which I think will yield useful data:

* basic composition of sample (readers vs. contributors)
* basic demographics (gender, age, nationality, language, education level, etc.)
- exception: the "years of formal education" question will probably be
of limited usefulness; the occupation breakdown will have some gaps
* what contributors do
- exceptions: the detailed hours breakdown and category breakdown will
probably be of limited usefulness
* the "why contribute" reasons
* why non-contributors stopped contributing
* the "what purpose" question for readers
* the quality questions for readers
* the project and organization awareness questions

Sure, virtually every multiple choice question could have benefited
from additional choices, but that's always going to be the case -- you
can either try to process thousands of write-ins, or live with the
fact that some reasons will not be represented.

In general, there are some "numbers" questions which are dubious, but
we'll see what kind of data we get from those.

We won't get a representative selection of readers, but we wouldn't
get that anyway through a sitenotice survey. It's possible to just
interpret subsamples of the data which you want to examine to
understand e.g. differences between casual readers and frequent
readers.

The anonymized data will be CC-BY, so we'll all be able to get out of
it what's useful, and flag what's not.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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