[WikiEN-l] Worst. Survey. Ever.

[Jim]

Eric,
In my opinion this survey highlights one of the issues that I have with the
wikimedia foundation __a failure to collaborate - utilize wikipedians and
wikipedia__

By this I mean a failure to use the talented people that are part of the
community and failure to use wikipedia as a resource to find those people. I
would expect before taking on a survey like this one (assuming it was WMF
driven), or permitting a survey to be taken with its blessing (assuming it
was UMU driven), that several questions would be asked.
* What is the purpose of this survey
* Look inward - how can wikipedia and wikipedians be used as a resource on
this project
* Are there contributors/volunteers who have surveying expertise
* How do we identify those volunteers without skewing the survey results
* Are we using open source technology - in less than 5 minutes I found
limesurvey which appears to be a well written (although the forward back
buttons don't work), has buttons on every page and a resume later option -
and is superior to the software used for the UMU survey
* Is the open source technology well done - if not - what are other options

The same could be said of the recent donation banner - there are many
wikipedians - people invested in the success of wikipedia that have
non-profit and fund-raising expertise that could have been tapped to help
design, share best practices etc. The comments by the guy from
soschildren.org seem to be things we should have known beforehand.

I think this survey - at least for me - hurt the goodwill I feel for the WMF
because it was disrespectful of my time, and showed serious technology
defects that I will obviously make the results less than accurate. In other
words my level of trust in WMF has deteriorated.

Using the collabortive/expertise process is less difficult than it would
seem. I have had times where I have found wikipedians who could answer
esoteric questions by reading the wikipedia article, looking at the history
and emailing a few to see if they could help me interpret, understand a
difficult concept. My feeling is that if I can demonstrate a rudimentary
understanding of the subject matter (as gleaned from wikipedia) and can ask
intelligent questions, I will probably find someone who can help me get my
specific question answered.

This would be even more effective if used by the WMF - I know that if I got
an email from anyone with a wikimedia.org email address (especially if it
was a name I recognized - like Erik, Sue, Brion, Cary, Jay, etc) telling me
they noticed I contributed to page widget and that they needed a few people
with widget expertise, could I help, I'd help in a heartbeat because I would
see that contribution as being valuable, just like I see my edits as being a
valuable contribution.

Jim

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>