Finding and interviewing ex-editors

Howie Fung, who's doing some work for the Foundation, is interested in doing an "exit" survey of contributors who leave. This is a good opportunity to combine interests and actually get this information. I'm pointing Howie to this thread so he can contribute himself.

In the meantime, I'd like to encourage someone to summarize this thread and to start collecting ideas on whom to survey and what questions to ask.

This is great news! I'd like to work with him on the survey. I think this has the potential to be our most useful source of data. But we want to get a good mix of questions, without overwhelming people to the point that they don't feel like answering.

We also need a different survey for different stages of leaving. Users we survey on the first, second or third anniversary of their last edit are likely to have acquired some perspective on their experience; whilst users who just posted "retired" on their users page more often than not will be back in a day or two.

Do you think we'd ask them different questions? Or would we just get different answers? If the latter, then we can probably just ask a few questions about timing up front... and then see if there are any trends based on that.

I've started summarising this at Proposal:Survey Former users

Thanks to Eekim for introducing me to this thread. I think it’s great that there are folks in the community who are keen on the idea of getting a better understanding of why contributors leave. I think the people on this thread have a good understanding of the pitfalls of doing research like this (e.g., representativeness of sample), so I’m not overly worried about us misinterpreting the information that comes back. I do think a meaningful distinction to make is very active contributor vs. someone who might have made a handful of edits and then left. My guess is that the reasons for leaving would be different for these two groups so it’s probably worth treating them separately.

I think the idea of contacting these users directly (vs. say an online survey) is a good one. This allows us to keep the questions open ended and not presume answers. We may not be able to contact as many users, but I think we'll get more textured information. I do think we should ask a set of questions which are consistent across each group. This will help us calibrate the data. But we should also stay flexible. I’m sure these conversations will lead us down unexpected paths, which is a very good thing. We can also do an online survey, but I think the objectives would be different.