[WikiEN-l] Worst. Survey. Ever.

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 10:21 AM, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> This survey could only be completed accurately by someone:
> * with nothing to do / too much time on their hands
> * who never makes mistakes
> * who can anticipate future questions before they're asked
> * who can be bothered to search for his country and language
>  (several times) in strictly-alphabetical lists of every single
>  country and language in the world
> * who knows the 2-character ISO code for the languages he knows,
>  even when they're not obvious (e.g. DE for German)
> * who knows the 3-character ISO code for the currency he uses
[snip]

While I would not use your harsh language, I did encounter many of the
same frustrations you did.


Un-anticipated follow ups made me re-consider my answers prior
questions, which I couldn't change without a back button. (For
example, my 'time spent' allocations will look screwy, because I
binned things together which shouldn't have been).

There were questions which I couldn't realistically provide precise
and reliable answers to such as "How many unique articles have you
started", "How many unique articles have you edited",  ... thought at
least it didn't expect me to provide answers with 1 unit granularity
for over 500.   (I still wasted a lot of time actually looking up the
correct answers, though I'm sure almost no one else would, and I ended
up having 'over 500' anyways).

There were several cases where I was frustrated by the answer I would
have ranked highest being unavailable. For example, many of my content
contributions to English Wikipedia are photographs. But that was never
an offered option, though write-ins helped.

It allowed you to tell it about contributions in multiple projects and
languages, but didn't really provide a facility to express that your
contributions were different in different languages.   (For example,
being an admin on some projects and not others will result in vastly
different distributions of time).

I hope the question tree for people who are only readers is somewhat better.

In the future it might be helpful if the questions were made available
in advance to more than just translators. I specifically tried to find
the question sheet in advance on this one. I doubt I would have caught
the unanticipated followups without actually taking it, but I would
have pointed out a couple things which could have improved.

All that said I don't share Steve's pessimism: I expect the results of
the survey to be interesting regardless of the survey's shortcomings.