My impression is that the Foundation wants to see editors saying they feel discriminated against. “Support healthy diversity in the editing community by doubling the percentage of female editors to 25 percent and increase the percentage of Global South editors to 37 percent” (target for 2015) might not be possible for various reasons. Gaining more females will be a challenge and it isn’t sexism on the projects that are the issue. But forcing new policies to counter what is almost assuredly not the primary reason for the lack of diversity will give the impression of doing something.

I am curious to see the reaction from the Foundation if it turns out that perceived discrimination is low. Unfortunately, a follow-up survey will be needed if responses do initially appear to validate the concern since the detail needed to address it was way more than asked for. What is the actual prevalence of the issue instead of has it occurred in the last six months.

The questions invite editors to be victims. Of course some editors in a contentious topic areas (nationality is a big one here) are going to answer “yes” even if the edit summary and talk page comments were clear of any bigotry.

The amount of questions needed to actually gauge prevalence of discrimination will require a follow-up survey. But hey, if the Foundation wants to assume that the editor-base is full of racists and sexists who cannot edit neutrally then who am I to argue.

In terms of questions we should have asked but didn’t, we’ll look at improvements for the next round…and I think we’ll add some free text comment boxes to enable respondents to add perspectives that might not have been captured well in a specific question.

On not being able to access the survey, apologies. We used a new approach for this survey. It was targeted to all logged in users, but the notice only appears for one log-in. This approach helped us deal with sampling bias issues and it limits the time that editors had to see the banner. The downside was that some people missed it and then couldn’t find it (because there was no alternate route into the survey). In future, we’ll put in place a plan B option that allows people to find the survey if they missed it on the notice.

The biggest specific issue I saw was the question about Fluther and Quora. Fluther doesn’t even seem to rate an article on Wikipedia yet. Quora I also had never heard of. But you ignore the StackExchange sites, which produce great CC-BY-SA content which Wikipedia can leverage. I’ve been involved with the security site (http://security.stackexchange.com) recently. The software is proprietary, but very well done.

Worse, there’s a message that “This may be the only time you see this message” which I find very strange (and frustrating if the link won’t work for some reason.) Is the intention to collect replies from a random sample of editors or anyone who wishes to contribute? If so, is there a direct link to the survey?

Thanks!