User:RagCall/Survey results

This is becoming a blog post at some point, or maybe a FLW page.

This is based of just, like, one person's takeaways from the survey. I have included takeaways which seemed to be a general trend (which is judged somewhat subjectively).

Disclaimers

While I do have a little bit experience with statistics, I have not taken the time to apply and scientific methods. It's more like "if I tilt my head and squint, this could indicate the following trend". Or "those numbers sure look big, huh".

The trends are based on the first 377 responses.

Takeaways

The results are presented in the following form:

Example Heading

General takeaway/trend

Specific issue that came up related to this question

Remediation suggestion

Navigation to the wiki

A lot of people wrote in something like "search plugin/smart search of my browser", "I always have it open" and "I have a shortcut like 'fl <subject>' to search the wiki"

Add these options in the next survey

Some people misunderstood the question as "how to you browse within the wiki"

Reword question

At least one person doesn't know about the 1 click extension

The extension should be prominently linked somewhere (possibly on Special:Search via MediaWiki:Search-summary and the sidebar)?

Finding out about the wiki

The options seemed to be comprehensive enough, although we might consider adding an "IRC" option for Alan.

Editing activity

Most people who answered were not active editors. (This is good. The wiki is mostly for readers.)

Finding information

The median response is an 8/10, which shows that the wiki is already quite good, but there is notable room for improvement.

Focus of the wiki

The comment field was also used for general feedback.

Cleaning up links to the old wiki in the comments

Done as a result of the survey.

Variations of "Making it easier to see where items can be grinded"; "mark retired/seasonal options more obviously"; "focusing on actually available content"

See #Better Information Offensive

Finding guides

The trend seems to match the answer to #Finding information, although I haven't looked at the raw data to see if there is actually a correlation.

Links in the sidebar usage

Yeesh. Most people don't use them at all or barely. I am not sure what the takeaway here is.

Results are hard to interpret

See if other answers shed light on the sidebar links issue, or if it even signifies anything. (Most people are still generally happy, after all.)

Links in the sidebar usefulness

Around 20% report they are not useful at all; 15% report "5", which some users commented they sometimes used as a "dunno/does not apply" option. Otherwise it seems to be an even spread (possibly a normal distribuitiion around 8), which is a bit unexpected, because I personally though it would be a normal distribution around 5.

Links are not useful

Think about what links could be more useful

Interpretation of "5" as response is unclear

Include "not applicable" or similar as an option in the next survey

Aesthetical pleasantness of the wiki

Most (around 80%) have taken 7-10.

In hindsight, this should have been weighted with "How important is it to you that the wiki is aesthetically pleasing". On the other hand, these kinds of questions are notoriously hard to design because a lot of people don't know what aesthetics they want until they see them. (I do not mean this to be dismissive. It's a well-known fact in the design community. That's why we test things.)

Maybe we should more offensively advertise that users can change the site layout if they are logged in.

Usage of wiki tools vs external tools

There is a skew towards the side of "within the wiki", which shows we have a better search engine than Tumblr. Tbh I expected this to be bimodal with peaks around 2 and 9. Not sure what the takeaway is here.

Using Semantic MediaWiki to find information

Notably, this has the least number of responses out of all the multiple choice questions. While the other questions have 370-377 responses (with another outlier being #Links in the sidebar usefulness at 361), this one has only 320, that's 15% less.

Also, yeesh. We need to make SMW more useful and present it to the community