User:Scs/Wikipedia Survey 2008

[My impresssions after completing the Wikipedia survey conducted in October-November of 2008.]

I'm sorry to be harsh and blunt, but the survey is terrible. You can't use my results accurately -- they're wrong. I doubt you can use anyone's results accurately.

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

The survey told me I couldn't use my browser's Back and Forward buttons, but had to use its own. That's rude.

The survey then failed to provide Back buttons on all pages. That's incompetent.

The survey then asked me questions like "How many hours do you spend contributing to Wikipedia, per week?", followed by "How many hours to you spend administering Wikipedia?", followed by "How many hours do you spend supporting Wikipedia in technical ways?" And that ended up being profoundly insulting. Here's why.

The administrative and technical work I do on Wikipedia feels like "contributions" to me, so (not knowing the next questions were coming up) I included those hours in my first answer. And the technical work I do feels like "administration", so (not knowing the next question was coming up) I included that in my second answer. Therefore, if (as I suspect) you're assuming those three categories are disjoint, and since my major contributions lately have all been technical, I've inadvertently overstated my overall contributions in this survey by a factor of three.

And those particular survey pages were among those without Back buttons, so I couldn't fix my mistake. Do you know how incredibly frustrating that is, to have wanted to spend time contributing to a survey, to know I've contributed false information, and to not be able to fix it?

Also, the survey took way too long. And there was no information given up-front about how long it might take. The progress bar in the upper right-hand corner was a clue and a nice touch, but it came too late.

The survey also took too long in relationship to the impression of the data likely to be gleaned from it. Short, tightly-focused surveys give the surveyee the impression that some well-thought-out, concise questions are being addressed by the surveyer. Long, scattershot surveys give the impression that the surveyers aren't quite sure what they're looking for, are trying to ask everything they can think of, and are imagining that they'll mine the data later for interesting results later. But, with poorly-defined surveys, that task often ends up being difficult or impossible. So I'm left begrudging the time I spent filling out the survey, because it feels like the ratio of time investment (by me) to useful information which can be gleaned (by you) is not good.

The survey asked me to specify things like "approximate number of articles edited" and "percentage of time spent translating" using drop-down selection boxes -- and with an increment of 1 between the available choices! That's just silly. (I dreaded how long I was going to have to scroll down to find my article edit count -- 1196 -- and was both relieved and annoyed to discover that, after 500 entries, the drop-down list ended with "more than 500".)

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.

At the very end, the survey asked if I wanted to submit my results, or fix any mistakes. But the provided way to fix mistakes was to use the Back button -- perhaps several dozen times -- which I wouldn't have felt like doing even if the chain of Back buttons were complete.

The survey was clearly designed by someone who was thinking about the data they wanted to collect, and in a scattershot way. The survey was clearly not designed with the person completing it in mind. The survey was clearly not designed or vetted by anyone who knew anything about designing good surveys.

I probably had more complaints to list, but I shouldn't waste as much time on this message as I already wasted taking the survey, so I'll stop here.

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 survey's hostility towards its participants. If you conduct a survey like this again, please find someone to assist in the process who knows something about real-world survey work.