OK in that case it is like any other survey,
except that from an
anonymous community member there are unlikely to be the safeguards re
personal data that an Academic at a University could offer. So my
presumption would be against any collection of personally identifiable
information, even if only stored by the researcher.
WSC
On 28 November 2011 19:22, Siko Bouterse <sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
I should clarify that in Steven Z's case, we
aren't discussing paying
him to do a survey - as I do agree with WSC that this falls within the
realm of what the community expects volunteers to do, it is something he's
undertaking on his own initiative, he wasn't commissioned to do this
research.
Even with the potential for bias, I don't know if it is practical to
stop community members from undertaking research projects to help them
understand how well their own projects are working. In online community
projects I've worked on outside of Wikimedia, my teams (volunteers and paid
staff) have often needed to use tools like surveys and other
"research-like" feedback mechanisms, A/B testing, etc to help us understand
the successes and failures of our own projects - perhaps it would be better
to commission unbiased outsiders to do this research, but its usually not
very feasible.
Although as I said before, I am somewhat interested in the survey
results to learn if there are projects the foundation could support related
to Dispute Resolution, but if Steven wasn't planning to do this research
right now we will not be hiring an independent researcher to take it on
instead. (If this is confusing in the proposal itself, please let me know
- I think sometimes volunteers believe that suggesting "official WMF
support" will help their cause when in fact the opposite is often true!)
He got pointed to RCom for approval to run a survey, and I guess what is
still unclear to me from the comments in this thread is should he be going
though RCom's process to get approval, or not?
Siko
On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 10:07 PM, WereSpielChequers <
werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is very much focussed on the model where a
community member
identifies a problem area which would benefit from research, and then they
want to be paid to research it.
My concern about such applications are that you risk blurring the line
between what the community expects volunteers to do for free and what it is
willing to pay for; Also we need to be wary of pushpolling, I've already
seen research done by community members being criticised for that and I
think we need very clear rules to prevent that happening.
The advantage of an independent researcher is independence, hopefully
neutrality and if we request it a certain verifiable professional standard.
The disadvantage is that they cost money and may misunderstand the
community.
The advantages of a Wikimedian researcher are that they are presumably
a volunteer and that they understand what it is that they are studying. The
disadvantages include their possibly wanting to research an area of the
wiki that they have strong opinions on, and that they are unlikely to have
verified credentials for holding personal data for research purposes.
I really like the idea of using research to investigate some of the
problems of the community. There are several areas where community opinion
is deadlocked and independent neutral research might possibly supply the
information that could break that deadlock. But I'm uncomfortable about the
model of commissioning existing volunteers to investigate areas where they
have strong opinions. I would prefer that we have something of a Chinese
wall between topic and researcher. So community members would be welcome to
propose research projects, and also to offer to undertake research
projects, but not to be both the proposer and the performer of the same
paid for research. Or at the least we should avoid paying editors to
undertake research in an area where they are known to have strong views.
For example; The theory that I find most credible as an explanation of
the decline of the community since 2007 is the end of the "SoFixIt" culture
and its replacement by the templating culture which some consider newbie
biting and which has lead to hundreds of thousands of articles disfigured
by garish templates calling attention to problems that somebody hopes
someone else will understand and fix. One possible partial solution to that
would be to replace some of the maintenance categories with unobtrusive
hidden categories, but to do so we need research to establish whether or
not these templates succeed in getting newbies to edit. Currently the
community is too divided as to whether we think the templates work as a
call to action for us to agree a change, but a small amount of independent
research should be able to establish which view is more correct and thereby
enable the community to make an informed consensus decision.
WSC
On 23 November 2011 00:43, Dario Taraborelli <
dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> All,
>
> here's a message from Siko, WMF Head of Community Fellowships. As with
> the 2011 Summer of Research, WMF is willing to fund research (both in the
> form of individual fellowships and small grants) to contribute to a better
> understanding of our community and projects. While there are existing
> procedures for community fellowships and grants, we don't have guidelines
> to apply for research fellowships/research grants.
>
> Some community members have started submitting research proposals for
> RCom review and I thought this could be a good chance to get Siko and Asaf
> (Head of the WMF grants program) to help us draft guidelines for the
> evaluation of research fellowship/research grant proposals, which are
> currently missing from
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:FAQ
>
> What I envision is a two-tiered process:
>
> (1) RCom will first review proposals based on its standard procedures,
> regardless of funding requests. We will solicit the opinion of external
> referees via a single-blind review process when needed (we did this for the
> EPIC/Oxford proposal). We will then write our recommendations whether a
> specific proposal is methodologically sound, relevant and non-disruptive to
> our community to help WMF make a funding decision .
>
> (2) WMF will request supplementary information to projects applying
> for funding and use this information, feedback from RCom and its internal
> assessment of the priority/usefulness of the proposal to make a funding
> decision.
>
> This will help RCom focus on the research value of the proposal per se
> while leaving to the WMF fellowship/grant program the actual funding
> decision. On a related note, I am working closely with Philippe Beaudette
> to configure SugarCRM to help us triage, handle and assign requests for
> RCom review.
>
> Please let me know if you have any comments or concerns on the overall
> proposal. As Siko notes, the Dispute Resolution project below is a research
> proposal from a community member asking for regular SR support/review, not
> a WMF-sponsored project, and potentially a good case to get this process
> started.
>
> Dario
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From: *Siko Bouterse <sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org>
> *Date: *November 22, 2011 10:33:58 AM PST
> *To: *Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>
> *Subject: **surveys by community members*
>
> Hi Dario,
>
> This is a survey request from a community member interested in
> learning more about his Wikipedia projects, for RCom's review:
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Dispute_Resolution
>
> Background:
> Steven Zhang is active in MedCab and the creator of some other DR
> pages and processes on EN:WP. I've been speaking with him about the
> possibility of doing a fellowship on dispute resolution, though an exact
> project is still to be pinned down and nothing is approved for fellowship
> at this point. Although the survey is not an official WMF project, and
> Steven is acting in the capacity of community member, I am interested in
> the results of his survey to learn more about current issues with DR and
> see if there are projects that we should support in the form of a
> fellowship.
>
> This may be a growing need, I've gotten a couple of similar inquiries
> so far and expect they will increase as we ramp up community fellowships.
> I'm curious to know what the RCom process looks like for surveys run by
> community members, some of whom might not have the same research background
> or methodological training as academic researchers, but are motivated to
> learn and share understanding about their community and projects. Is this
> something worth asking about on the RCom list? (If so, feel free to
> forward my message).
>
> In this case, its a relatively small sample size so hopefully not too
> disruptive. I think Steven could also use some guidance about what free
> survey collector would be recommended for use - is RCom ok with something
> simple like Google Forms or have other recommendations?
>
> Thanks!
> Siko
>
> --
> Siko Bouterse
> Head of Community Fellowships
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>
> sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> RCom-l mailing list
> RCom-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/rcom-l
>
>
--
Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse(a)wikimedia.org