[wp-hackers] Automatic feedback from users

[Omry Yadan]

Dave Pappas wrote:

> "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics"
>
> This is a great topic.  I am sure the effort will produce interesting
> statistics.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure it will produce actionable
> information.  Self selecting surveys are less meaningful then other
> approaches.  
How is this self selecting? (Assuming this goes into core and not into a 
plugin).

> My fear is that you are producing a plugin that will be
> installed by a subset of users and of that subset, another subset will opt
> in.  You don't need a large sample size to draw conclusions about the
> population as long as the sample is truly representative of the population.
> Allowing people to opt in or out means you will have a (relatively) small
> sample size that probably does not reflect the entirety of the Wordpress
> installations in the world.
>   
Will you agree that there is very little correlation between how the 
privacy awareness of users to their server PHP and MySQL versions?

> I would still find the information interesting - I just don't think you can
> make decisions driven by what the 'average' WP user has installed.  You
> won't know much about the average WP user - only those who like contributing
> towards these kinds of efforts - like myself ;-)
>   

Judging by my own efforts to collect such data, I can tell that between 
10 to 20 percent of the users installing FireStats agrees to send 
anonymous statistical information.
this is surely high enough to draw conclusions about many things.