One of the main goals is to determine whether experienced editors and newbies have different responses. A result such as "new users like this, but experienced editors don't" would be very useful to a product manager, as it would suggest that a recent change broke workflows for the core community.
Consequently, we need to collect some (public) information about the individual who is responding. On the other hand, we don't need (or want) to be able to associate any particular response with any particular user. We need to decide what information to collect. This could include some combination of:
- User rights: Some combinations, especially at smaller wikis, are only held by one user.
- Total number of edits: Any large number is likely to be held by a very small number of people. However, recording the order of magnitude would make it much harder to differentiate between users. [[User:Jdforrester]]'s 20,173 edits and [[User:WhatamIdoing]]'s 86,134 edits are both unique edit counts at enwiki today, but both would both be recorded as "10 to 100K".
- Account age: Number of days, months, or years will generally be useful, but there's no need to know that an account is "11 years, 4 months, 19 days, 6 hours, 29 minutes" old. Just "11 years" should normally be enough.
- User interface language
- Gender: according to the setting in [[Special:Preferences]]
The main reasons to collect the information automatically, rather than adding a bunch of extra questions, are (1) to significantly reduce time and hassle for editors, and (2) to ensure completeness and accuracy of the information.