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@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/11/1 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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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