Talk:Article Creation Workflow/Survey of New Page Patrollers

Introduction

The purpose of this survey is to gather information based on four main objectives:

• Identify the suitability of editors for new page patrolling
• Help recruit more patrollers
• Establish whether or not NPPer should be a user right
• Better understand their needs, and make patrolling easier through the development of tools such as for example the Zoom, and possibly making a tutorial - perhaps a video, and introducing other new page controls such as filters that can automatically identify some problem pages as soon as they are saved.

The survey questions address three main areas, so some regrouping of the questions might be necessary:

1. About you: This section asks for some basic background that might help to identify levels of maturity and competence,, and where they are geographically based because there is a need to know when patrollers are available online.
2. Your Wikipedia activities: This section is designed to provide a profile of the users' general Wikipedia experience, which may give some indication of knowledge levels of how Wikipedia is structured, how it works, and its policies.
3. Your patrolling of new pages: This section is designed to provide feedback on their experience at working closely as a reviewer of content. It also gathers information on why editors do NPP and how they found out about it.

--Kudpung 11:40, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Revision

I just posted a revision of this. I took a stab at reorganizing the questions along Kudpung's themes above. Here are some proposed changes:

• Where applicable, I've made the questions/answers consistent with what WMF did in the Editor Survey.
• For the respondent's Wikipedia edit history, I've changed the questions to simply ask the respondent to input their information from memory. While I think linking them to the X!'s counter, the counter itself is a bit too interesting and respondents may end up playing with the counter and not completing the survey. Alternatively, we can ask for their username and we can look up their edit counts after the fact.
• I've separated out the NPP-specific questions into two sections: Background and Workflow. Background contains questions about motivation, how they surveys likre this ar guaranteed to be anonymous, found out about NPP, etc. and Workflow contains more detailed questions about their specific NPP activities. I’m wondering if it would be possible to condense the Workflow section into 2-4 questions and maybe follow up with individual respondents for more detail. Howief 23:03, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Just a couple of observations: Although surveys are guaranteed to be anonymous, respondents nevertheless occasionally find some questions intimidating. Considering that this survey addresses respondents that are form different cultural backgrounds I'm not sure if a question on sexual orientation is appropriate, Just for example, Brits over 50 may find the question offensive and might give up on the survey (I would). I also don't see how this is relevant to NPP.

There are huge differences in cognisance and maturity between the ages of 12 and 17, I personally favour keeping this as granular as possible - this is also based on my empirical research into requests for adminship, from allocating other user rights, and blocking or mentoring minors. This is also based on the fact that NPP attracts many youngsters. We could make this a dropdown of all ages from 12 to 60, or a free text box (numerals); this wouldn't pose any technical difficulties.

In view of the guaranteed anonymity, I don't see how it would be technically possible to follow up with individual respondents.

--Kudpung 23:34, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree that gender may not be necessary. If it's not critical for the purposes of understanding page patrollers, we can keep it out. We can also do a male|female|other/decline to state.

How about asking users what year they were born with a drop down? This way, we can have the granularity if we need it.

I think we should guarantee anonymity as the default option, but provide respondents with an opportunity to participate in further research if they so choose. Howief 00:05, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Excellent suggestions. --Kudpung 04:04, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Rather than a dropdown , just enter year of birth into a text field (numerals), regex queries can parse this quite easily.. Yes to male|female|other/decline to state. I'm adding something to the end of questionnaire about getting additional feedback, perhaps you can modify for something better. --Kudpung 04:11, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Sexual orientation is unimportant, but gender should have more options. The WMF surveys usually include four: male, female, transgender, and transsexual (plus "prefer not to say"). WhatamIdoing 15:09, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

doi:10.1038/nature08711 :-) Have mörser, will travel 20:22, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Even if you collect this info, I'm not sure how you'd interpret it in this context; see [1] vs. [2] :-) 79.119.87.5 20:34, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Previous in-depth research has demonstrated that female editors have a different approach to their work on Wikipedia. I think all we need to know is their gender. Because the survey is anonymous, I don't see how 'prefer not to say' would be either necessary or helpful. --Kudpung 08:46, 14 October 2011 (UTC).

Well, if you don't mind having offended people refuse to complete the survey—exactly as you say above that you would personally do for a different question—or to make up garbage answers, then you could make selection of either "male" or "female" mandatory. WhatamIdoing 15:01, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Research into survey psychology (long before Wikipedia was around) has shown that most people do not waste 15 minutes making silly answers to polls. The people who we are addressing on this survey are the very editors who are supposed to be fighting vandalism. While I feel that asking people about their sexual orientation is inappropriate for our purpose here, I don't think anyone would be offended by having to admit to their gender. The question comes early in the survey, if anyone abandons the questionnaire at that point, so much the better - the list of target respondents is long enough to lose two or three. --Kudpung 17:19, 14 October 2011 (UTC)