On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Christophe Fergeau <[email protected]> wrote: > 2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras <[email protected]>: >> Would you like to rephrase the survey to don't assume the respondent >> is using GNOME, and then ask this question? >> == Which desktop environment are you currently using? == >> >> This should spot the people that are more likely to be unhappy. > > Ah? How so? Is it an initial assumption that people using G3 are more > unhappy with their DE than people using something else?
What?. The survey might return that 50% of people are unhappy with GNOME, but if you add that question, it might turn out that 70% of the unhappy people are not actually using GNOME. Then you can concentrate on the answers of 30%, if that makes you happier. Anyway, if you don't like my question, suggest another one. >>> Given the kind of questions, it's bound to >>> attract answers from people who want more options, and I don't think >>> how we can go from "N% of the people who took the survey said they >>> wanted more options" to "M% of *all* G3 users want more options". To >>> me, these figures will be totally unrelated, unless I missed something >>> in the way you want to run the poll. >> >> They are certainly not the same, but if N = 100, you can say with >> certain degree of certainty that M is certainly not 0. > > Of course, but since we don't know how many people in total are using > G3, N=100 will only tell us that there are 100 people out of an > unknown number of users that want more options, and nothing more. Read your own text: "N% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options" -> "100% of the people who took the survey said they wanted more options" > In > particular, if this 100 people end up as 60% of the poll respondant, > we'll have absolutely no way to go from the poll results to a > percentage which means anything for G3 users as a whole. Ie without a > careful selection of who answers the poll, even if 60% of the poll > respondant said they would like more options, we don't know if this > maps to 1% of all the users, or to 90% or to something in between. > And I'm ready to bet that this "60% of the people who answered the > poll want more options" will quickly become "60% of gnome users want > more options, and developers don't listen!". That's why I'm > questioning the gathering of these numbers. They are only very > marginally useful, and in spite of that, they will be misused. If you think it's likely that N=100 maps to M=1 regardless of the number of responders, then I think I'll be wasting my time providing you with logical arguments. >> So you prefer, the status quo, which is "we have no idea about what >> anybody thinks". > > Not necessarily, but if we gather these numbers, we have to agree from > the start that they unfortunately won't mean a lot, You can't decide that beforehand. Suppose the number of responses is 1 million. First you get the numbers, then you try to make sense of them, and _then_ you can decide if anything needs to be done. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
