Update question: some user data

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 12:14 -0500, Doug Ledford wrote:
> On 03/08/2010 11:05 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 10:27 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >>
> >> Le Sam 6 mars 2010 20:04, Adam Williamson a écrit :
> >>
> >>> The numbers do surprise me, to be honest. As I write this, it's 34-8 -
> >>> that's over 80% - in favour of 'adventurous' updates.
> >>
> >> Advanced users (those most likely to want a more stable rawhide to use it as
> >> primary system) use irc, mailing lists, bugzilla, etc. Normal users (those
> >> that need a stable Fedora so they can spend their time writing apps, doing
> >> i18n, etc) do not read Fedora forums (if they had this kind of time they would
> >> not object to adventurous time-wasting updates).
> > 
> > I don't think that's an assertion you have any kind of evidence to
> > support.
> 
> Well, I stand as a data point that matches this assertion (although you

Just the one data point, then? Yet people are complaining about a poll
with over a hundred responses not having sufficient data points?

> could leave out the rhetoric about advanced users and all, the data
> point of "people that use Fedora to get work done" versus "people that
> user Fedora to tinker" I think is probably a fairly accurate assessment
> of what people might or might not be found on Fedora Forums).
> 
> > It's really quite sad that half the people who've responded to
> > the poll have done so by attempting to poke holes in it, as it happens
> > not to line up with what they think.
> 
> That's not fair.  Yes, many have poked holes in the poll, but to be
> fair, as you said, it's unscientific and it *does* have holes in its
> methodology.
> 
> > If you think the poll is wrong - provide some data to disprove it.
> 
> I'm sorry, but that's a scientifically specious argument.  Invalid data
> doesn't become valid because there is no valid counter data.  It is
> valid or invalid all on its own.  To date, no one has run a
> scientifically valid poll, but that doesn't make your poll any better or
> worse, it just makes it all by itself.

My basic point here is that the poll, while imperfect, is the best
indication we have available so far.

My second important point is that complaining about a poll being
problematic and backing up your complaint with nothing but utterly
unsupported assertions is entirely hypocritical. If my data is invalid,
their assertions are...well, even *more* invalid (although validity
isn't an analog concept, I accept).

> > Counteracting it with yet more assertions built on precisely no evidence
> > is not convincing.
> 
> Well, one of the questions to be asked before going any further on this
> is what audience do we care about?  I've heard it over and over again
> that Fedora is supposed to be a developer's platform, and not a user's
> platform.  If that's true, then the people that should be voting on this
> is the people that make Fedora, not the people that consume it.  If the
> reverse is true, then it really doesn't matter what the users vote
> anyway because then it's up to us to decide *which* user segment we wish
> to target and build the OS to satisfy them.

I agree, and I'm one of the people who's been saying this for months. On
a practical level, though, it doesn't look like it's going to happen any
time soon, whereas by some of the comments in this thread, some people
seem happy to claim that FESco has sufficient authority to decide an
updates policy on its own, and also seem as if they have some
inclination towards doing so.

So it seems like there may be efforts to make changes in the update
policy situation _before_ the target audience issue is settled (which,
like you, I do not think is a good idea).

As I said right back at the start, I primarily did the poll because more
than one person in the thread happily asserted that 'users don't want
adventurous updates', without bothering to provide any kind of support
for that claim. It's a lot harder to make that claim now, I think. Even
if you want to argue that the poll isn't sufficiently rigorous to
'prove' that users want adventurous updates, I think it's sufficient
data to make it clear that barely asserting that users don't want such
updates isn't admissible.

> Now, as for the wording.  It was both subjective and vague.  Neither of
> those leads to a good poll without at a minimum putting in additional
> questions to narrow down responses.  As an example of why I call it
> subjective and vague, I could have worded the same "adventurous" and
> "conservative" options as "gratuitous" and "reasonable", 

That's not a very good example, because you're taking the wording that I
claim is good and replacing it with bad wording and saying 'this proves
the wording is bad'. Huh?

By that token you could take any well-worded poll, replace it with bad
wording, and say 'the fact that I can plug bad wording into this poll
question means the original wording must also be bad!' It's a
non-sequitur.

The whole reason I chose the words 'adventurous' and 'conservative' is
that I don't believe either of them have especially positive or negative
connotations. Which is clearly not true of 'gratuitous' and
'reasonable'.

> To be a valid poll, we have to be precise
> enough that people know what they are voting on without the wording
> leading their thoughts.

In theory I agree. In practice, it's impossible to ensure this (_any_
poll question can be deconstructed), and I don't think the wording I
chose was significantly leading.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net