On Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:46:48 +0000, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)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