[WikiEN-l] Worst. Survey. Ever.

[Steve Bennett]

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 1:21 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

Such hate! I took the survey, and while it was imperfect, didn't find
it provoked any kind of existential crisis.

My main complaints were questions like "How many hours do you spend
doing X: 47 hours? 48 hours? 49 hours? 50 hours?..." - far too much
precision.

And of course the standard problem with most surveys, when you're
forced into either/or choices, and the choice you really want isn't
there, or you think two answers are correct or something.


> The survey's categories were too-bluntly taken from existing
> lists.  For example, the list I had to choose my employment from
> was apparently taken from one of those dreadful Department of
> Commerce categorizations, that I have just as much trouble
> finding my job in when I fill out my tax forms.

Agree here - given how many editors are likely in the IT field, you'd
expect smarter, more precise options.

Similarly, it was pretty stupid how the most common option for "what
language wikipedia do you read/write/translate to" - English - was
buried in the list. That was tedious.

> The survey was clearly designed by someone who was thinking about
> the data they wanted to collect,

Erm...yes? Logical, don't you think?


> Bottom line: Please use the results of this survey with extreme
> care, if at all.  The results are going to be heavily, heavily
> biased by the inadvertent selection criteria involved in the

IMHO, leave the survey operators to deal with such issues. It's not up
to us to concern ourselves with the accuracy of their data. They
probably have ways of working out how meaningful the answers to each
question were.

Steve