On Thu, Sep 18 2014, Pine W wrote: > Yes, but supposedly phone survey companies are able to get representative > samples of broad populations despite many people refusing to respond to > phone surveys. If opt-in users were chosen using similar methods, could > arguably representative data be obtained?
... Well, at least it could be representative of the opt in population, and if that's an interesting enough population it could be worthwhile. For example people who opt to donate during the yearly fund-drive could be further invited to participate in page view tracking, say, and people who've opted in to both conditions might be taken to be representative of donors, who might be taken to be (vaguely) representative of the general population. The data from this group could be factored out against other people who opt into page view tracking who aren't donors, etc etc. (Probably I've described something that's already been done, or that can't be done; I'm not attached to the particular example!) Further OT micro-rant about population research in free/open culture -- Although I'm very naive about Wikipedia research I've been wondering if it would be possible to do a crowd-sourced pattern finding research on Emacs use, combining ideas from: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RepetitionDetection http://popcon.debian.org/ At least in the programming world, I think the "moral" thing to do is to write programs that optimize repeated activities, and that there would be a potentially huge gain to doing this on a population-wide basis rather than on an individual basis. Because despite what I said above the first virtue of individual programmers is laziness! We're perhaps only "moral" at the population level. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
