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 have had difficulties doing so).

1,000 new contributors (defined as users who have registered in the last 2 weeks, and made at least 5 edits during that period, and not been blocked) 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 few options to distribute the survey:
 * 1) 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.
 * 2) 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.
 * 3) We could retrieve email addresses and mass-mail people through CiviCRM.

Page 1 - Fixed questions

 * 1) For Tranche 1 users If you wanted to start a discussion with other users on Wikipedia, do you know where you could do that?
 * Yes
 * No
 * 1) For all users Which of these types of discussions do you think are appropriate to have on a Wikipedia discussion page?
 * Discussing changes to articles; discussing the subject of an article, not just the content;
 * Discussing the contributions and behaviour of Wikipedia contributors;
 * Discussing the subject of articles, not just the content;
 * Asking for help;
 * Discussing things not related 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 alone.
 * 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 Do you think the purpose of Wikipedia's discussion pages differs from the purpose of comment systems on other websites? If so, how?
 * 2) ditto What parts of discussion pages work well
 * 3) ditto What parts of discussion pages work poorly
 * 4) ditto How could discussion pages be improved?