Talk:Reading/Multimedia/Media Viewer/Survey

Bias
"Is this media viewer useful for viewing images and learning about them?" The response to such a question must not be summarised as a response to "Is it useful?", because it's not what you asked. The two questions would be equivalent only if "for viewing images and learning about them" was irrelevant, i.e. if the one and only criterion for usefulness of our wikis was the "viewing images and learning about them". --Nemo 06:59, 26 April 2014 (UTC)


 * +1. Moreover, the interesting question would have been "Is this media viewer better than the previous solution?" --84.130.143.14 09:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Totally biased. I actually hate the interface, but I answered yes. Because it is "useful." Had I known they were using this as an approval survey I would have said no. I also submitted a response to the text field that I noticed was not included in the tabulated responses. "How do I turn it off for good?" 50.59.88.46 17:16, 1 August 2014 (UTC)

Survey Renormalization To Match Our Readership
The survey tries to look at general Wikipedia use across languages, but the sampling was way way off from our actual readership. This has resulted in very misleading results. Readership firgures were obtained from https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageViewsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm Note that 3.3% of Wikipedia pageviews are for the language-neutral and content-free Wikipedia Portal page, this 3.3% is factored out in my final calculations. Hungarian accounts for 0.3% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 5.8% of survey responses, a 19.3x over representation. Hungarian is the 19th most used Wikipedia language, I have no idea how it landed on a top-8 survey language list. Dutch accounts for 1% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 9% of survey responses, a 9x over representation. Dutch is the 11th most used Wikipedia language, it doesn't belong on a top-8 language list. Catalan accounts for 0.09% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 0.7% of survey responses, a 7.7x over representation. Catalan is the 33rd most used Wikipedia language, ranking it a solid almost-one-tenth-of-one-percent above Klingon. French accounts for 4.7% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 21.2% of survey responses, a 3.05x over representation. Portuguese accounts for 2.8% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 7.7% of survey responses, a 1.85x over representation. Portuguese is the 9th most used Wikipedia language, and shouldn't appear in a list of 8 either. Spanish accounts for 7.1% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 18.6% of survey responses, a 1.77x over representation. German accounts for 6.6% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 6.3% of survey responses, 0.96x under representation. English accounts for 45% of Wikipedia readership, but makes up 30.8% of survey responses, 0.68x under representation. The 3rd largest Wikipedia readership, Russian, is completely unsampled. Japanese (5th), Chinese (7th), and a long list of rare (but cumulatively significant) languages are also absent. All told 26.4% of Wikipedia readership was left out. There is no way truly fix this absence, but we can recalculate the over/under representation as if this 26.4% of the world didn't exist. Restricting our work to the available 8 sampled languages we get he following adjusted normalization factors: Hungarian is over represented by 13.07x Dutch is over represented by 6.08x Catalan is over represented by 5.26x French is over represented by 3.05x Portuguese is over represented by 1.85x Spanish is over represented by 1.77x German is under represented at .65x (The survey counted the German Readership as less than 2/3rds of a person each) English is under represented at .46x (The survey counted English Readership as less than half a person each.) When the raw survey data is reweighted using the above factors to account match our actual readership I get the following final survey totals: The fairly dramatic shift in percentages is due to the unfortunate coincidence that both languages where MediaViewer was heavily rejected were both grossly undersampled, the fact that these two languages alone comprise more than half of all Wikipedia readership (!), and the fact that there was wild over representation of fringe languages where MediaViewer polled positively. I couldn't even begin to speculate why MediaViewer polled so much higher in fringe languages, but whatever the reason, the polling methodology generated very misleading results. The conspicuous absence of major languages Russian Japanese and Chinese also undermines the value of the results, but probably not by more than a few points. As a significant side note, this reexamination of survey data may help explain some of the division between between WMF's positive office view of MediaViewer statistics, and WikiEditor's "in the field" view that MediaViewer is worse than our normal image page. I'm a math geek, but renormalizing survey data isn't something I've had to do very often, chuckle. I heartily invite anyone to recheck my results. I only used two significant figures in some steps, but any rounding effects should be negligible compared to the noise inherent in the original data. Alsee (talk) 23:47, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Useful for viewing images and learning about them: 39%
 * Not useful for viewing images and learning about them: 50%
 * Not Sure: 10%