Wikipedia:User survey

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There is demand from some for there to be an optional User survey to be implemented across the Wiki[pm]edia projects that would contain questions to help improve newbie and regular user experiences; to inform future tool and project development; to help connect users with subjects, groups, and other readers/editors to improve their contributions to and benefits from Wikipedia; and to help researchers understand the community composition and dynamics.

Survey features

Features of such a survey:

1. Separable. Key questions should be on an initial page; with subsequent pages of questions that might be less-frequently answered.
2. Repeatable. Users should be able to retake the survey, particularly to complete sections or pages they had no time for at first
3. Anonymizable. Survey takers should have the option to remain anonymous when taking the survey, guaranteed that their responses would only be passed on in aggregate form.
   • Some may wish the option to be completely anonymous within the database, so that their survey input is not associated with their username. However, that might involve separating such non-repeatable, less-verifiable, more-anonymized results from the core results, and as a result might not be very useful to others...
4. Updateable. Survey writers will regularly revise the survey; it should allow updates while also ensuring that a minimum # of survey-takers take an identical older version, when necessary.

Survey attempts

German Wikipedia survey

Source. See also Wikipedia:University of Würzburg survey, 2005.

Findings:

• The number of speakers of a given language is positively correlated with number of articles in that language Wikipedia. French, German and English speakers are the most active (highest number of articles per speaker). image
• The number of articles is positively correlated with Gross Domestic Product, albeit with significant variance.image
• Age: The mean age is approximately 30.8 years. The median is at 27 years. 62 per cent are between 15 and 32 years. Distribution flattens exponentially to at the higher age. The distribution is skewed to the right (there are more young wikipedians than old). image image
• Gender: 88 % male; 10 % female; image, gender statistics are similar for the administrators sample
• occupation:

   Not indicated 0.9 %
   Full time 42.5 %
   Part time 10.4 %
   (School) pupil 6.6 %
   (University) student 25.5 %
   no employer-employee relationship 4.7 %
   Other (e.g. retirement) 9.4 % 

• Education: image Low validity, seems to indicate a bias towards natural sciences?
• family

   not indicated 4.7 %
   Single 50.9 %
   in firm partnership living 27.4 %
   marry 15.1 %
   divorced 1.9 % 

Source and method: preliminary results of University of Wuerzburg study (see WP:ACST; sample was 960) and others

Hebrew Wikipedia satisfaction survey

In July 2007, the Hebrew Wikipedia conducted a satisfaction survey among its readers. Costello volunteered to devise the platform for collecting the data and analyzing it. The results and their analysis are currently available in Hebrew. Further information in English is available here: Hebrew Wikipedia satisfaction survey.

Others

See, among others, User:Sj/Survey/draft, User:Alterego's survey, at least 5 academic surveys whose authors contacted sample editors via their individual user talk pages (see WP:ACST), and similar surveys in German, Japanese, and other language Wikipedias.

At Meta there is a project (meta:General User Survey) to create a Wikimedia Foundation wide survey; however the project has been stalled since 2005 due to lack of interest from developers (the theoretical side is mostly done, but there is nobody available to help with practical website implementation).

but recently the opensource tools caught up, see on meta. we just need to install, and hack the questions into the tool.