On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 01:58 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
Jesse Keating wrote:
> Please stop banding about the forum poll as if it were some sort of
> scientific measure with meaningful results one could use as a basis for
> decision making.
It's the best data we have.
Bad data is worse than no data.
> It was none of that. All it gave us was info we already had. Some users
> would like more adventurous stuff, while some users would not. We already
> had that information, the poll told us nothing new.
The poll told us an approximate proportion, which is so far from 50-50
(72.13%) that we clearly have a statistically significant majority, also
considering the sample size N=183. If you want me to actually compute some
p-values and do statistical tests, I can do that, but to me the numbers look
obvious.
Now you may try to argue that the sample is biased, but you have no actual
evidence towards that.
Of course the sample is biased. It's a sample of people who frequent
the forums, that's a self selecting group of people, by no means a
worthwhile representation of the Fedora user base as a whole.
In the absence of better data, the data we have is what we should use as the
basis for our decision, not your personal opinion nor some imaginary "silent
majority" which never has been proven to exist.
If you aren't happy with the data, start collecting some better one!
Kevin Kofler
Proper scientific data collection is hard, really hard. To do it right
would take a lot of time and engineering and even argument. I don't
want to put in that time, nor do I think we could ever be able to truly
have a good representation as we have no hard data on who all uses
Fedora, and in which ways.
--
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca:
http://identi.ca/jkeating