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_2011-12-22
[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:

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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.

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Thank you,

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ChaTo (Carlos Castillo) Let's connect! · LinkedIn · Facebook · Twitter @ChaToX