Hi Everyone!
This caught my attention on Monday, and I think that there are many in
the group who would be interested in helping to submit a response to
OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy).
http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28623/request-for-i…
Take a look at the call, I also believe that the WMF might also be
putting together a response? I am not 100% sure, but maybe we all could
coordinate something. I am also not familiar with how responses are
submitted hopefully someone in the group knows! The response is due Jan
2, 2012.
Best,
Cheryl (user:MichChemGSI)
Hey Chato
nice to hear from you, your suggestion is very timely and I hope you don't mind if I forward it to RCom-l.
(everybody: Chato is a researcher based in Barcelona who recently completed a study of gender differences in Wikipedia, with Mayo as a coauthor)
Chato: we discussed extensively a similar proposal during the last RCom meeting [1] (which finished just minutes ago). The majority of RCom seemed to support the idea of a platform on which individual editors could decide to participate in research in general, in what study or type of research in particular, and with what frequency and to revoke their permission to be contacted for these types of research at any point. This solution would allow us to avoid the problem of gauging community consensus on every single subject recruitment request that we get as well as the problem of finding an appropriate recruitment method to suit everyone. We also discussed what role RCom could have in reviewing and flagging recruitment requests before they get posted to this platform. The notes of the meeting are here [2]
Melanie, Aaron and myself volunteered to start a proposal on Meta, I'd be great if we could get your input once we have a first draft.
In the meantime, enjoy your holidays!
Best,
Dario
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-12-…
[2] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RComDec2011
On Dec 22, 2011, at 1:16 PM, ChaTo (Carlos Alberto Alejandro CASTILLO Ocaranza) wrote:
> Hi Dario,
>
> Sorry if this is way too late, I was traveling these last days, now I am in Chile ;-) But anyways, this is what I promise to try to write up after our meeting last week:
>
> ============================
> Proposal: Wikipedia editor panel
>
> Several research topics require some sort of survey/interview to be applied to a sample of Wikipedia editors. Currently, this is done in most cases by directly contacting editors via their user talk pages, which is considered a bad practice by the Wikipedia Research Committee WRC.
>
> It is proposed that the WRC maintains a large editor panel that can be partially assigned to different research groups.
>
> Editors would be invited to be part of this panel by a number of channels to be defined, including the semi-annual survey. Editors would indicate the maximum number of different surveys they would like to participate in per year (e.g. 1-4, 5-10, 11-50, 50+), and fill-in a demographic form including age, gender, etc.
>
> Researchers would apply to conduct surveys to subsets of this panel via the WRC, indicating: the target number of editors requested, and some constraints (based on a schema of the properties available for editors, provided by WRC).
>
> The WRC would review the request, and on approval, and forward a URL provided by the researchers to a sub-set of the panel matching the constraints requested by editors. (This matching should balance load, there are a number of algorithms for this including http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3312). After this, the survey would be handled directly by the researchers, who would send a post-survey report to the WRC indicating e.g. response rate received.
>
> Why the alternatives are bad?
>
> - Handling each research request on a case-by-case basis, aside from requiring more effort by the WRC, would generate a number of different messages to editors, which can create confusion among them.
>
> - Allowing researchers to add questions to the semi-annual survey has a number of problems: it may blow-up the time required to answer the survey, it may affect the responses received given that users already have answered a long questionnaire, etc.
>
> ============================
>
> Thank you,
>
> --
> ChaTo (Carlos Castillo) Let's connect! · LinkedIn · Facebook · Twitter @ChaToX
All,
this is to confirm the schedule of the forthcoming RCom meeting on Thursday at 1.30pm PST.
I will host a skype conf call (dario.taraborelli) and we'll default to the rcom channel on IRC in case of issues, I'll send a link with an etherpad for notetaking shortly.
http://doodle.com/vb5w8ntrftmyp4w3
Attendees confirmed so far:
Dario
Yaroslav (only first 30')
Aaron
Mayo
WSC
Melanie
Diederik
I look forward to talking to you
Dario
Hi, In case any of you aren't aware there are a couple of requests for
comment that involve us.
One on EN wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Central_Notices…
on my reading is divided between those who want to put some control
on research surveys and those who say its pointless discussing it - the WMF
will act regardless.
The other is on meta. There isn't quite unanimity at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Global_banners#Require_…
but the first 23 voices were all in support. I would suggest that though
this RFC has not yet been closed, considering the depth of feeling it would
make sense for us to proceed as if it had been closed on the basis that
use of Global Banners for non-fundraising purposes require consensus
support for use of central notice.
My reading is that the community could be persuaded to accept a limited
amount of surveying, but we would need to be able to convince people that
we could control the amount of it. I would be surprised if the en
discussion were to be closed as constituting consensus for the resumption
of the Berkman survey.
I'm intending to add a section to the meta debate seeking consent in
principle for an annual Omnibus survey, but I won't file that until after
tomorrow's skype chat.
Regards
WSC
All,
the fundraiser team is currently reviewing with Legal a project that involves a collaboration with All Our Ideas - http://allourideas.org
If you haven't heard of it, AOI is an open source platform for public consultation designed by Matt Salganik, a sociologist based at Princeton University.
AOI has been used by local authorities, organizations and movements (such as OWS) to allow large collectives of individuals to suggest, rank and prioritize ideas.
The goal of this collaboration is to open up the fundraiser design process to readers and community members. You can read more at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Banner_Challenge
Matt will be available to answer any questions you may have on the project's talk page.
If you wish to contact the WMF team involved in this collaboration you can drop a line to Megan or Zack.
Dario
Dear All,
After the rather hostile response on the English language wikipedia to the
Berkman survey I would like to revive my proposal from five months ago for
an annual Omnibus survey.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Omnibus_Survey
I appreciate that this would put some constraints on the researchers and
would actually cost the Foundation a bit of money. But unless someone else
can come up with an alternative way of fairly throttling research surveys
to the point where the community can accept them, I would suggest that this
is the only viable option on the table other than a simple blanket ban on
third party research surveys.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
All,
this is to give everybody the heads up on a CentralNotice campaign that we launched hours ago to support a research project involving English Wikipedia editors. The project is run by the Berkman Center and Sciences Po and has been extensively reviewed for about a year by the research committee, the WMF Legal team, the Community and Tech depts and discussed in community fora [1]
The banner is going live for a few days (target end of the campaign: Monday night, conditional on the number of completed responses) and is being displayed only to a subset of logged-in editors of the English Wikipedia meeting a series of eligibility conditions. The banner has been designed to minimize disruption to our editors as requested during the community consultation process.
Since we are getting the first confused reactions from the community via different channels, I asked the researchers involved in the project (Jérôme Hergueux and RCom member Mayo Fuster) to set up a FAQ page prominently placed on the project description on Meta [2] and Jérôme has already started to draft one. This should allow us to have a central place to address community concerns on why we are doing this and point people to the long discussion and review process that led to the decision to support this project.
I have been working on this project to support the technical/legal implications longer than I expected and I'll try and catch up with my RCom backlog as soon as possible.
Dario
[1] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/08/experiment-decision-making/
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Dynamics_of_Online_Interactions_and…