On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:46:48 +0000, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
The controversy over Berkman is not in my view primarily a communication issue and it certainly isn't about the legitimacy of that survey. I
believe
that the community trusts RCom as a regulator of research to know
whether
research is legitimate or not.
A big part of the controversy is over advertising, and I'm not convinced that you can design a banner ad for a third party research survey that isn't seen by some as advertising for that third party. An Omnibus
survey
could be a Wikimedia one and therefore I would argue an internal ad
rather
than a third party one. Perhaps that isn't our only option, and maybe
there
are alternative ways to solve that, one way would be to change policy to allow advertising for bona fide research. But that would be a difficult
one
to sell to the community, particularly on the heels of a fundraising
drive
where "Wikipedia doesn't take ads" was a core message.
The other aspect of being a regulator of research is the issue of how we control the amount of research requests made to the community. To my
mind
that is fundamental to what we should be doing, and it is a major reason for my being on this committee. But this is almost an opposite thought process to "promoting research".
There are two proposals that I've made as to how we do this, one would
be
to contact everyone once a year with an Omnibus survey, the other rather more complex one is to throttle back research surveying by volume and
limit
each campaign to a small subset of the community. The two approaches can
be
hybridised by rewarding institutions that collaborate by allowing them
to
use our systems to approach a larger proportion of editors. One reason
why
I was opposed to the Berkman survey was that it was the worst of both worlds - one single research project going to all or almost all of our
most
surveyed community.
I'm not convinced that the community currently has confidence in RCom to regulate the amount of research requests that wikimedians and especially English language Wikipedians are exposed to. Nor am I convinced that everyone on this committee regards that as our responsibility. To my
mind
this gives us a couple of possibilities, one would be to try and agree a mechanism for limiting the amount of surveying that Wikimedians are subjected to, and then sell that to the community via a request for comment. One option in any such request for comment could be for the community to agree not to put any constraints on researchers, but I'd be surprised if that option got consensus however strongly it was promoted
by
some members of RCom. The other possibility would be to clarify that the remit of this committee is to promote legitimate research by vetting proposals and otherwise communicating with the community; and to inform
the
community that if it wants to put constraints on legitimate researchers contacting wikimedians via the site then it needs a an additional
process
other than RCom.
WereSpielChequers
Thanks for your ideas, which I find very much reasonable. I have an immediate objection though. Not all research goes through RCom, and we have no means to stop any single person or organization from sending a hundred messages to talk pages. For instance, recently it was a survey with the purpose of understanding the role of the female editors, or whatever the purpose was (It is difficult for me to find a link immediately, but it can be done, I guess it was run by Sarah Stierch and colleagues). They did not bother to go to RCom, and I could imagine what the response were if we demanded that for instance this survey would become part of Omnibus. Since it looks almost inevitable that we have to go and ask the community opinions at some stage, we probably also need to ask this question: Should every research requiring subject recruitment be regulated (reviewed) by RCom in advance, or may be the community (first robably of en.wp) just does not want any regulation of the subject recruitment.
Cheers Yaroslav