Flow/New contributor survey

Liz made the excellent suggestion that we should survey new Wikimedia contributors to find out

Goal
The goal of this survey is to establish the motivations and needs of new users in engaging in discussions on Wikipedia. In particular, it focuses on:


 * 1) How they understand the purpose of talkpages;
 * 2) How good or bad they find the current system;
 * 3) What elements of the current system work well for them, and should be preserved, and;
 * 4) What elements of the current system work poorly, and should be replaced.

Target audience
The primary purpose of this survey is to gather the opinions of new contributors. Because of the deployment plan for Flow (namely, relying on small, opt-in deployments for a long period of time), there are plenty of opportunities for experienced contributors to give feedback on the designs and features, explain what they need talk pages to do, and correct our mistakes. Most of these interactions, however, will have to happen on, you guessed it, talk pages. That's fine for experienced users, but a hurdle for newcomers, many of whom haven't used talk pages before (or are actively blocked on doing so).

5,000 new contributors (defined as users who have registered in the last 2 weeks, and made at least 1 edit during that period) will be surveyed, split into two tranches - one for users who have contributed to a talk: namespace, and one for users who have not. The surveying software used will be the WMF SurveyMonkey account, with analysis performed by Oliver using R. We have a couple of options to distribute the survey. First, we could just drop a link on their talkpage. The problem with this is twofold; first, it increases the chance of "junk" data from people other than the intended recipient filling out the survey. Second, it undermines the neutrality of the data provided by forcing everyone to, one way or another, experience discussion pages in a highly limited way.

Second, we can liaise with the Growth team to display a notification or message to users falling within that class for a certain time period. More of that delivery process would be automated (automated is good!) but it requires engineering time, either from Growth or Core

Page 1 - Fixed questions

 * 1) For Tranche 1 users Are you aware of Wikipedia's "talk" pages?
 * Yes
 * No
 * 1) For Tranche 1 users, answering "yes", or Tranche 2 users Here are a set of statements about the purpose of talk pages. Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with them. If you don't know the answer, feel free to leave the statement unanswered.
 * Talk pages for articles exist to discuss the content of an article, and things that should be added to or removed from it.
 * Talk pages for articles exist to discuss the subject of the associated article.note to self: needs serious love
 * Talk pages for users exist to talk to the user about their edits, or things related to Wikipedia.
 * Talk pages for users exist to talk to the user about things unrelated to Wikipedia.
 * 1) For Tranche 1 users, answering "yes" to Q1 Have you tried contributing to Wikipedia's talk pages?
 * 2) For Tranche 1 users, answering "yes" to Q3, or Tranche 2 users Here are a set of statements about the experience of using talk pages. Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with them. If you don't know the answer, feel free to leave the statement unanswered.
 * I find discussions easy to read.
 * I find discussions easy to contribute to.
 * I find it easy to discover when other people have replied to a conversation I am participating in

Page 2 - freeform questions

 * 1) For Tranche 1 users, answering "yes", or Tranche 2 users How do you think the purpose of 'talk' pages differs from the purpose of comment systems on other websites?
 * 2) ditto What parts of 'talk' pages work well, and should be preserved?
 * 3) ditto What parts of 'talk' pages work poorly, and should be released?
 * 4) ditto What could we include in 'talk' pages that isn't already there?