MediaWiki User Survey

MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group

Markus Glaser

Motivation

• Insights for the movement
• How is MediaWiki used?
• What are the most pressing issues?
• Insights for the group
• What is our target audience?
• What roles do they fulfill?
• What is the state of the MediaWikis out there?
• Outreach
• Gather user contacts
• Make us known to the target audience

Technology

• Google spreadsheet is good for small and quick surveys
• Easy to set up
• Gives you live data
• Initial graphs and summary function

Spreading the news ...

• Key issue: how do we reach the relevant people?
• Primary interaction is “Download MediaWiki”, users leave no trace
• Strategy: distribute the link broadly at places users go to
• Mailing lists: mediawiki-l, mediawiki-enterprise-l, wikitech-l, semediawiki-user
• Websites: Wikiapiary, note on MW Download page
• Twitter: #mediawiki
• Personal social media accounts
• We reached about 25.000 people (estimation).

...and wait for responses

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The tension is unbearable :)� By Mglaser (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Result presentation

• Presentation during Wikimania (pre-published version)
• Online version on our homepage: http://mwstake.org/mwstake/wiki/MediaWiki_Usage_Report_2015
• Various references in discussions and talks
• Feed findings into a follow-up project: MediaWiki Wishlist
• Still people do not know about it

Learnings

• Pretest your questions
• Figure out how to use the official Wikimedia channels
• Have several channels to push this
• Push the survey in waves
• Track hits by using a short link service
• Have realistic expectations about the number of responses (hits to response ratio was 10:1)
• People are very willing to give qualitative input
• Don’t be afraid to talk about the survey, people will find it very useful
• There is already data out there. Put your data in place