A new project has been added to the Research directory: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Investigating_editing_anxiety_in_ne…
The PI – Benjamin Cowan – is an HCI researcher based in Edinburgh and I had a few conversations with him on this project over the last weeks.
This research sounds very timely and relevant to WMF's work on new user engagement (I am cc'ing the Summer of Research list), but we need to figure out how to best handle the recruitment of participants.
One option we discussed would be to (temporarily) integrate a questionnaire into the new MoodBar feature [1], but I need to discuss this internally with the tech people.
In the meantime your feedback is very welcome. I told Ben we need more information, for example on the target sample size. He'll be adding more details in the coming days.
Dario
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MoodBar
FYI, we have a new recruitment request. Please see the writeup (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymity_and_conformity_over_the_n…)
and discussion (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Anonymity_and_conformity_over_…<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research_talk:Anonymity_and_con…>
)
-Aaron
On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 5:57 AM, Michael Tsikerdekis
<tsikerdekis(a)gmail.com>wrote:
> Dear Dario Taraborelli & Aaron Halfaker,
>
> I would like to bring to your attention a new research project that i
> posted on Wikipedia. The page can be found here:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymity_and_conformity_over_the_n…
>
> As i describe in the text the benefits for understanding the differences
> between complete anonymity, pseudonymity and when users use their emails can
> be tremendous for online communities and increasing collaboration.
>
> I also attach to this email a draft(which i haven't proof read yet so
> errors can be present) which contains a more rigorous presentation of the
> concepts. In fact this draft is the planned version that eventually after
> fixing will be send to the publisher of the journal.
>
> I need to note that the methods that i proposed are subject to change if
> they violate certain guidelines. Generally i will accept whatever changes
> you propose as long as they maintain the probability sampling method which
> is essential for better results.
>
> Since the survey has already been developed. I am providing you with two
> links(if you need more i can give you more) so that you can see it for
> yourselves and judge(hopefully with good comments but constructive criticism
> is more than welcome) :-)
>
> http://www.urcity.com/survey/index.php?user=17503006602
> http://www.urcity.com/survey/index.php?user=45766208972
>
> Thank you for taking the time to consider and i eagerly waiting to hear
> back from you :-)
>
> Best regards,
> Michail Tsikerdekis
> PhD student at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics
> Brno, Czech Republic
>
Goran and I were talking yesterday and it reminded me on the need
which I have from time to time in relation to the Language committee:
Wikimedia peer reviewed journal. A couple of months ago I thought to
push it as Language committee issue, but yesterday we've released that
it's more logical to have it under RCom umbrella.
The journal should publish papers needed by Wikimedia. If we need a
research or even a review about anything, we could offer to a
researcher or scientist publishing the paper in our journal (of
course, if it passes some minimums). Creating infrastructure for peer
reviewed journal shouldn't be too hard or costly.
Thoughts?
Hi,
We have a new research request at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kudpung/NPP , and I definitely can't
review as I'm somewhat involved, and heavily involved in various other
nonresearch things with the same editor.
Unlike previous requests this is very much a request from within the
community, so if anyone knows a grad student who is looking for a research
topic to get involved in this could be an interesting opportunity. The
survey will probably happen anyway - but I doubt if the results would be
circulated outside the Wikipedia community unless someone saw this as an
opportunity.
WereSpielChequers
Hi,
I have reviewed Randall Livingstone's "Understanding the Editor/Bot
Relationship": http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Understanding_the_Editor/Bot_Relati…
I have also had a chance to take a look at the list of questions and
everything seems quite fine.
Since this was the first time that I reviewed a research project here,
I have opened a poll on the project's discussion page and I am asking
for second opinion - in spite of the fact that I do not see any
possible problem in relation to this study. Please find some time to
take a look at this since Randall needs to start his recruitment
procedures very soon.
The link to the project's discussion page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Understanding_the_Editor/Bot_R…
Thank you.
Best,
Goran
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
"Truth is much too complicated to allow
anything but approximations."
:: John von Neumann
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.milovanovicresearch.com
Greetings-
I am sending this request both to Dario Taraborelli (who I've dealt with in
the past on a research project review and approval) and to what I understand
is the appropriate email for the RC at large (as I understand Dario is
currently unavailable). I have recently created a Meta page for a new
research project, Understanding the Editor/Bot
Relationship<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Understanding_the_Editor/Bot_Relati…>,
and I would like to request a RC review of the project so I can move forward
with participant recruitment. I have already received IRB approval from the
University of Oregon (protocol #08262011.107, 8/30/2011).
Please let me know if there are additional steps necessary on my end for
review, or if this request should be sent to a different contact person,
list, or committee. Thank you very much in advance for your time and
attention.
Sincerely,
Randall Livingstone
User: UOJComm
--
Randall Livingstone
Doctoral Candidate & Graduate Teaching Fellow
School of Journalism & Communication
University of Oregon
livingst(a)uoregon.edu
I would really like to have some work about people with special
permissions on Wikimedia projects (starting with rollbacker, then
admins etc.): is retention different than with regular users? if so,
how? did some policies have impact on behavior of those users; if so,
which? do Wikimedians with special permissions influence development
of wiki and how (just in broader sense, of course)? which
recommendations could be given based on statistical data? is it
possible and how if possible to have real-time analysis of the trends?
if possible, a tool would be needed; and so on.
Not a lot of information outside of statistical analysis would be
needed, so it wouldn't require extra organizational efforts initially.
The initial target would be small wikis and all of them are
standardized by stewards. In future it would be good to have such
research on all Wikimedia wikis.
So, the only issue is to find a researcher who would be willing to do
that. I would mentor such researcher and I would connect him or her
with other relevant Wikimedians, if necessary. I don't how how the
process related to the finding researcher and mentoring him goes, but
I suppose that Dario has clue :)
Dear all,
We've talked several times about resource and value, and there has emerged a
clear divide between some who see the valuable resources at stake in this as
programmer time and IT resource, and my view that the valuable resource we
have is our editors' time and patience. Mostly I've expressed that in terms
of throttling spam - we don't know how many surveys and how much overlap in
surveys our editors will accept before they dis-enable Email, add research
survey sites to the spam filter or start blocking researchers even if we've
authorised them. In my view nobody wins if we wait until "the tragedy of the
commons" has struck and all researchers have permanently lost access to a
large proportion of our editors.
But there is another aspect where I think we may have been talking at cross
purposes, and that's in our perception of the commercial value of research
access to our community, and the motives of the researchers who have
approached us. Wikimedia is a long established top ten website and one of
the most famous examples of crowd sourcing and online communities. Most of
the other successful websites wouldn't dream of allowing a competitor or
potential competitor to conduct such research on their community - major
websites are worth billions, so an insight from research on another
community could be incredibly valuable. Our position is different, we are
open to the re-use of our data for commercial purposes per CC-by-SA and a
permissive approach to research as compatible with that. I haven't asked
what commercial sponsors if any have funded the work of the various
researchers who approach us, and I'd be happy for that to continue, provided
we keep three safeguards:
I Open licensing. Anyone who wants to broadcast research surveys to our
editing community needs to agree that the anonymised results of those
surveys will be available under cc-by-sa, and not just a statistical digest
but the actual dataset so that variables can be cross tabbed. But I can
live with the researcher(s) also having a copy of the data under a different
copyright if they are narrowcasting to a small group of editors rather than
broadcasting to a large group.
II Timeliness. The cc-by-sa anonymised dataset needs to be published pretty
much as soon as it could be, and not kept back until after the researcher
has published their analysis of it.
III Transparency. The nightmare scenario to me would be if a top thousand
website or aspirant:
1. Sponsors some Academics to do research in an area where they are
having difficulty or want to improve their own online community.
2. Sponsors Wikimedia (most of our money comes from individuals, but
sometimes a company gives us a few thousand dollars)
3. Their sponsored researcher has private discussions with some or all of
us, and gets dispensation not to release part or all of the data they
collect in a way that would enable their sponsor's competitors to get the
same benefit of it.
4. Either they attribute part of their subsequent turnaround to "insights
achieved via research sponsored on Wikimedia", or someone independently
links the three previous points and accuses the WMF of selling research
access to its editorship, and selling it cheaply.
So far the only argument I've seen for confidentiality is that researchers
don't want the data subjects to have a preview of the questions as that
could skew the results. I'd accept that as reasonable, if a bit tenuous -
the chance of there being a significant overlap between this list and any
conceivable research sample is low. But it could be resolved by holding the
discussion on an Email thread that doesn't get posted until after the
surveys are posted.
Regards
WSC
Hi everyone,
While Dario is out (on vacation I believe) on his behalf I wanted to forward
on an something RCom should be aware of.
You may have heard that in the past Wikiversity community members have used
the project as a platform to study Wikimedia projects. It came to our
attention that this issue may have cropped up again through an English
Wikiversity community member performing some kind of experiment on English
Wikipedia.
In their discussion<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_notic….>,
the English Wikipedia community has concluded that a good bit of his work is
nonsense and problematic from a copyright standpoint. He’s indefinitely
blocked on Wikipedia and they are evaluating whether best to delete
everything he’s ever done or check each article edit individually. There is
also some productive
discussion<http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Marshallsumter>between
the user and English Wikiversity community members.
My understanding is that there isn't anything which necessarily needs to be
taken action on by RCom members immediately, but we felt it was important
you should be aware of this, since it's the not the first time we've
encountered issues with contentious research projects conducted cross-wiki.
If there are further developments we'll keep RCom updated.
Thank you,
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org