[Wikimedia-l] Upcoming Survey, Feedback requested, and Office Hour

[Delphine Ménard]

Hello Tilman,


On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi Delphine,
>
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 6:57 AM, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Tilman Bayer <tbayer at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> ...
>>>
>>> Still, I was aware that there had been some objections to that
>>> question by chapter representatives (which I don't assume have to do
>>> with the fact that respondents rated chapters' performance lower than
>>> that of other entities in the two previous surveys), and looked into
>>> these concerns while the present questionnaire was prepared; I also
>>> reached out to one of the critics in person at Wikimania. But I still
>>> haven't seen a compelling argument why the way the question is asked
>>> should be biased against chapters. The argument that the opinion of
>>> Wikimedians who live in countries without chapter should not count
>>> seems weak to me, e.g. because the projects that the work of chapters
>>> aims to support are international, and because the question asked
>>> about chapters in general, not one particular chapter.
>>
>> That is not the argument I was trying to make (ie. voices of
>> Wikimedians in a country without chapter don't count). Rather, there
>> is a long list of things the Foundation does, where people are asked
>> whether they knew about it, or not. And after that, right when people
>> have been made aware of everything the Foundation does, they are asked
>> to rate the work of the Foundation. The same question about the
>> chapters comes after absolutely nothing has been said about chapter
>> work, which, I believe, does introduce a bias. In short, people are
>> being asked to rate something they *at this point in the survey* have
>> an idea about (for the WMF) although they might have had no idea about
>> it before starting the survey.
>> All I'm asking is that we review the context in which this question is
>> being asked so results make more sense.
> OK, after some other people also remarked that preceding this question
> by other questions which conveyed quite some information about the
> Foundation's activities but not about the chapters' activities. we
> have now rearranged the questions so that this is no longer the case.
>
> This is a bit of a compromise regarding the structuring of the
> questionnaire into sections, but fortunately it could be done without
> invalidating existing translations or changing the variables of the
> resulting dataset.

Thanks. I will not hide that I am still not sure whether we don't now
have two "out of context questions" instead of just one, but I guess
it's what we could do for this round, so thank you for doing this.

I sincerely hope that we can all together revisit this part of the
survey to give results that can be used by all of us to increase
satisfaction and performance in the future. Contrarily to Sue, I do
think that these surveys (should) have a real-world impact and
(should) keep us all on our toes, fine tuned to the critisicism, needs
and wishes of the editors of the WIkimedia projects. As such I expect
us to make sure that we do get as precise a picture as possible of
what those are.

Best,

Delphine
-- 
@notafish

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