All,
I received an urgent request by a team of researchers who have been waiting for several months for an approval to run a survey of Wikipedia editors [1].
The team includes researchers based at Harvard and Sciences Po. One RCom member (Mayo) is also involved in this project.
The project aims to recruit participants by running banners for logged-in users on the English Wikipedia and the team previously sought community consensus for this recruitment method via a discussion on the Admin Noticeboard [2].
The planning of this project predates the creation of the Research Committee and the community discussion was not explicitly mentioned in the project page, as a result most people on RCom (myself included) were entirely unaware of it.
Over the last weeks we have successfully been able to channel new recruitment requests to Meta, where RCom and community members can discuss proposed recruitment methods for various studies. I told Jérôme and Mayo from the Sciences Po/Harvard team that their project should be no exception and I would like to solicit RCom members to comment on this proposal over the next days.
The request is sensitive not only for its tight timeline (there was apparently a commitment to get the banner campaign started today and the team has already allocated engineers to this project next week), but also because it would be the first time ever that we use the CentralNotice for research projects, and this is a decision that may have implications for future studies.
I'd like to have your thoughts on this proposal via its discussion page by Monday night (Pacific time) at the latest. I am particularly interested in hearing on this from community members (such as Ziko, WereSpielChequers, Milos, Steven).
Because of her direct involvement in the project, Mayo won't be participating in the discussion.
I attach below a letter that Jérôme addressed to the Research Committee to document the history of this project.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best
Dario