"- developing community guidelines for the representation of editors'
identities in research (similar, perhaps to the AOIR guidelines [2]);
- finding ways of making responsible requests to the WMF for data that
they hold that might benefit research outside the WMF;
- developing opportunities for researchers to collaborate and share what
they're doing with the wider research community (as Kerry suggests). "
Some good ideas here. The first point can be clarified in the ethically
researching Wikipedia page. The second point is something that RCOM
could do, if it focused more on helping researchers. Third idea is
related to the fact that too many researchers don't know about this
listerv or other (or any) Wikipedia/meta research pages. As I said two
posts before or so, we should reorganize all research pages, creating a
well-linked and non-duplicating best practices/list of structure a bit
similar to the Wikipedia Global Education program, then try to advertise
it to all all past and present researchers of Wikipedia.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
On 17 July 2014 17:55, phoebe ayers
<phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com
<mailto:phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>> wrote:
Part of the problem is a somewhat subtle demographic one: while
contributors to Wikipedia do turn over, so newer contributors will
not necessarily have seen lots of surveys, very heavy editors and
admins (who are often easier to identify) tend to be long-term
participants who might have been surveyed many times.
Additionally, the people who follow mailing lists, social media,
etc. (or at least the people who speak up on those channels) skew
towards very-long-term contributors who have strong opinions and
have seen it all before. So, if you advertise your survey on the
mailing list, that's the population you get, and that's the
feedback you get. (But it's a catch-22; there's not really other
obvious mass channels).
This is a really important insight, thanks for sharing it, Phoebe.
It's important to work out what the problem is that we're trying to
solve before we try solving it! If the key problem here is that
Wikipedians need to be protected from researchers constantly surveying
them, and actually the wide-ranging surveys are really rare these
days, then maybe the problem is with heavy editors and admins being
constantly 'surveyed' (although I'm guessing that this is not the only
research method being used as I talk about below).
Does anyone know whether this is actually a problem with editors these
days? I know that I have interviewed a bunch of editors over the years
without RCOM approval (some with RCOM approval) and I have only had
good experiences. Sure there were people who didn't want to be
interviewed, but they just ignored my requests - I'm not sure that
they would say that they were bothered enough that an entire process
needed to be developed to approve projects.
I think part of the problem here is that there is a bias towards
particular types of research projects in the way that RCOM was
designed. I do both quantitative and qualitative research on WP and
the quantitative research nowadays focuses mostly on capturing
large-scale user actions using the API or the dumps - I have a feeling
that's why there are fewer surveys these days - more researchers are
using the data to conduct research and (right now) that doesn't
require any permissions beyond what is required by uni ethics board
(and all the problems that come with that!).
The projects I do as a qualitative researcher tend to be exploratory.
I will interview people on skype, for example, about their work on
particular articles before I know that I have a project. I could
certainly develop a proposal to RCOM but it would be so wide-ranging
that I'm unsure what the actual benefit was. I think that a much
bigger problem is actually developing community guidelines around
ethical treatment of subjects who don't often realise that their
comments and interactions can be legally (but, I believe not
necessarily ethically) used without their permission (I wrote
something about my thoughts on this here [1]).
Basically, I think that we need to reassess what kinds of problems are
the most important ones right now that we want to solve rather than
resuscitating a process that was designed to address a specific type
of problem that was prevalent a long time ago. The new problems that I
see right now that a research community is best placed to solve are
things like:
- developing community guidelines for the representation of editors'
identities in research (similar, perhaps to the AOIR guidelines [2]);
- finding ways of making responsible requests to the WMF for data that
they hold that might benefit research outside the WMF;
- developing opportunities for researchers to collaborate and share
what they're doing with the wider research community (as Kerry suggests).
[1]
http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/06/27/onymous-pseudonymous-neither-…
[2]
http://aoir.org/reports/ethics2.pdf
Best,
Heather.
Anyway, this is a hard problem without super-obvious solutions,
and not one that there's a lot of models for -- very few online
projects are simultaneously as open with their data and as
interesting for research purposes!
best,
Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to
phoebe.ayers <at>
gmail.com <http://gmail.com> *
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