On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 7:39 AM, Lane Rasberry <lane(a)bluerasberry.com>
wrote:
Hello,
I feel that this is an unethical research project and I have told the
researcher so. We exchanged several emails and were unable to understand
each other. I asked them to please have their university ethics board
contact me.
I asked the researcher about RCOM and other things. This person said they
posted to RCOM, but "the Meta page states that submissions should receive
responses within 1-2 weeks, and yet our messages went unanswered. We have
institutional ethics approval, but that doesn't last indefinitely, and so
after receiving no response we opted to go ahead."
I am not going to share more than this publicly, but in short, I talked
with the researcher to the limit of their interest and they feel that they
must proceed with the research. Their oversight is at
<http://www.uwo.ca/research/about/research_offices.html>
The survey is voluntary, obviously, and anyone who doesn't wish to
participate need not. No one is under any obligation to promote it, and we
have no rules barring anyone from posting a notice of such a survey to
public mailing lists. The survey may not be well designed (we don't
necessarily know the full aim of the research), or well targeted, but I do
not see how that makes it unethical. No time or effort is consumed that is
not volunteered by anyone who elects to participate.
The WMF research committee is not the sole arbiter of who can perform
research or analysis of the Wikimedia movement or any individual projects;
it merely promises recruiting assistance as the result of approval. The
proposal for this survey was submitted to RCOM in January, with evidently
no comment or contact from RCOM since. The RCOM page says it has not met
since 2011. The process appears to be defunct and no researcher should be
required to wait for it to be resurrected.