All,
as some of you may have seen, a young researcher from UMN is requesting feedback for recruiting a large number of participants (1K) for a survey on Wikipedia participation:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participatory_Motivation_to_Commons-based_Pe…
As he was trying to bulk-mail 1K editors for this study we temporarily disabled email feedback functionality for his WIkipedia user accounts and explained that these requests need to be reviewed by the Research Committee and community. The detailed description that he posted is a good example of how straightforward it is to obtain extensive information on a proposed recruitment strategy if we start systematically channelling these requests to Meta.
In exchange of the effort researchers put into documenting their research methods, I would like to ensure that we don't keep them on hold indefinitely to obtain community approval if there's no need to. I believe the RCom should play an active role in assessing on behalf of the community whether a given recruitment proposal or data collection method is acceptable or potentially dangerous, so that once the proposal has been cleared by the RCom and we do not hear from the community within a given number of days, we can give the green light to the researcher. I am confident that such a lightweight model can work as long as we have community members on board who can help us identify issues we may not be aware of. I shortly discussed these ideas with Aaron and he will help draft a proposal to submit to the RCom for discussion during the next meeting.
In the meantime please post your feedback on the above proposal via its discussion page if you have any concerns with the methodology.
Dario
Dear all,
this is a friendly reminder that we are running a poll to define the date/time for the upcoming RCom meeting (to be held between May 19 and May 23). I will start working on the agenda for the meeting shortly but I anticipate this meeting will focus on the overhaul of the research section on Meta [1] (including the proposal for an open data repository) and on discussing potential incentives for researcher participation to this project.
I expect to close the poll tomorrow May 17 at 6pm PST, if you are interested in attending but you haven't given your availability yet, you can still do so at:
http://doodle.com/6uvmmq42ksi7yr9k
Best,
Dario
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/2011_overhaul
Hello folks,
I've added:
- Dana Isokawa -- assistant to the WMF strategy team; will help with
organization of the next RCom meeting
- Steven Walling -- Wikimedia community fellow; will help w/ Meta research
section reorganization
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
All,
here's my first attempt at describing the overhaul of the research section on Meta I have in mind. Please send me your feedback or be bold and edit the doc (apologies for using a Gdoc instead of a wiki page, but I'd like to see if we can reach an agreement within RCom on the general lines of this plan before making this public)
http://bit.ly/MetaResearch
Thanks
Dario
Dear all,
I started organizing the next RCom meeting and I'd like to hear about your availability for the following dates:
http://doodle.com/6uvmmq42ksi7yr9k
Please let me know if it's too short a notice for you to be able to attend, we should probably try and define a default time/day for future meetings to be able to follow a regular 1.5 month cycle.
I'll set up an Etherpad with the agenda for the meeting soon.
Thanks
Dario
--
Dario Taraborelli, PhD
Senior Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://nitens.org/taraborelli