Wikipedia Editors Survey 2011/Tech Department Involvement

The Technical Department has been called upon to help the Global Development Department fulfill its technical requirements for the editors survey. The survey will be powered by LimeSurvey,hosted at http://survey.wikimedia.org

Requirements to be met by Tech Department

1. A banner inviting a logged in user of Wikipedia will be displayed to that user only once
2. The banner will be localized to the user's configured language
3. Survey results for a given user will contain the following metrics about their editing activity:
   1. User ID
   2. The year they began editing
   3. Total number of edits in the user's lifetime
   4. Total edits in the past 3 months
   5. Total edits in the past 12 months
4. A stamp of the language in which they took the survey. May be it is through Lime Survey.

Implementation

CentralNotice

CentralNotice will be used to display a localized banner (only once) to a logged-in user. This functionality is already available in CentralNotice.

Banners will be displayed on ALL language projects. Banners will be localized for which we have survey translations otherwise the default will be English. In the event that the user's configured language is not one in which the survey has been translated, the banner language will default to English.

User metric injection into LimeSurvey

Passing user-metrics from a Wikimedia project to our LimeSurvey is a non-trivial task. The general idea is to perform a MediaWiki API call to fetch the defined user metrics when the banner is loaded for display. The metrics will then be passed along to LimeSurvey in the URL. LimeSurvey will return the correlated metrics in the survey results.

A diagram of user metric injection

LimeSurvey

With LimeSurvey, it is possible to:

1. Create a hidden question, unseeable by the user
2. Pre-populate the answer to a question with URL parameters

We will create one hidden question for each required metric, and pre-populate the answers by placing metric data retrieved by a Mediawiki API call in the appropriate URL parameters. These questions will not be seen by users taking the survey. The pre-populated answers will appear in the survey results in the same way as the answers to questions the user actually sees.

CentralNotice

The CentralNotice banner will generate the URL to take the survey on the fly. The banner code will make a call to the Mediawiki API to fetch the user metrics, then embed them into the survey URL.

MediaWiki API

User metrics will be reported by making an API call to the UserDailyContribs API.

Timeline

• March 22, 2011: Development and technical documentation completed by Features Engineering (Nimish, Arthur, Ryan)

• March 24, 2011: UserDailyContribs API deployed to production cluster

• March 24, 2011 (PM): Mani will provide running English Lime Survey ready for integration testing

• March 25- April 1, 2011: Integration testing, tuning and data verification on English survey by Features Engineering (Nimish, Arthur)

• March 30, 2011: Kaldari will provide finished banner code

• April 4, 2011 (PM): Mani will provide running 30 translated language Lime Surveys for integration testing

• April 5-April 8, 2011: Integration testing, and data verification on surveys in top 20 priority languages by Features Engineering (Nimish, Arthur, Kaldari)

• April 8, 2011: Surveys ready for deployment

• April 11-April 16, 2011: Editor Survey is run live by Mani on selected language wikis.

Japanese Editor Study Timeline

• June 20, 2011: Japanese translations completed and quality checked.

• June 27, 2011: Programming and translation integration begins.

• July 5, 2011: Programming QA/community review

• July 11, 2011: Study is run live on Japanese language wiki.