Editing Tasks Survey

Goals for Survey
In order to inform the design of editing tools for wiki projects, the design research team, in collaboration with the Editing team, is creating a survey to better understand these questions and gather some informative data:
 * 1) What are the most frequently done editing tasks for casual editors and power editors in both the wikitext editor and Visual Editor?
 * 2) Of all the tasks we could think to list, how easy or difficult are they for casual editors and for power editors to perform?
 * 3) What patterns do we see in qualitative feedback that casual editors and power editors can provide?

How are we going to get the answers?
For a survey like this to provide useful design information, we need to make sure to invite the right people to participate. For example, if we asked people who only read Wikipedia to participate in this survey, we would not get accurate answers, as readers do not have any editing experience. So, after a series of conversations about how to invite the right participants, we have decided to do the following to invite participants to take this survey:


 * 1) Define the two segments of users to invite to participate:
 * 2) "Casual editors" = 5 edits per month
 * 3) "Power editors" = 100 edits per month
 * 4) Design and build the survey in Qualtrics and pilot with a small group of users.
 * 5) Ask Analytics to query the database for 1000 of each Casual editors and Power editors, making sure to leave out anyone who has opted out of receiving emails through the system.
 * 6) Send the survey out to all 2000 participants and hope to get 100 responses from each group.
 * 7) Analysis on the collected data.
 * 8) Report out the findings here on this page.

Choosing the right survey participants
Three editor groups were identified to be contacted for the survey based on the monthly frequency of their edits in August, September, and October 2014. Note that since the frequency of edit counts changes from month to month for each editor, and an editor who is active in one month can become power editor in the next month, we assigned editors to each of the above categories based on whether or not they consistently stayed in the same category in the most recent three months (August, September, and October 2014). For example, we assigned an editor who has edited 100+ edits in the three months in group 3, and we did not consider an editor who has done 100+ edits in August and October, but not in September, in any of the three groups.
 * 1) Editors who had less than 5 edits per month in each of the three months.
 * 2) Editors who had between 5 and 100 edits per month in each of the three months ("active editors" in each month)
 * 3) Editors who had more than 100 edits per month ("power editors" in each month)

Based on the above criterion, we queries our internal data-bases for English Wikipedia users and found 9316 users to contact.