Forwarding an excerpt from a discussion happening on wiki-research-l, the full thread is at:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2012-March/001891.html

This might be of interest to those of you who have been working on SR-related policies and procedures.

Dario

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dario Taraborelli dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org Date: March 19, 2012 10:46:34 AM PDT To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Motivations to Contribute to Wikipedia x-mailer: Apple Mail (2.1084)

Hi Lane,

your proposed workflow is a good description of how I would like the SR procedure to function in an ideal world. I am not myself at the forefront of SR discussions, but I'd definitely like to see a more streamlined process and a better way of signaling to participants which projects are flagged as reviewed and which aren't. Part of the discussion that we had during the last RCom meeting of the RCom was precisely focused on this issue [1].

If you want to contribute to the SR discussion, I strongly recommend you post your proposal on this page [2] so it can be seen and discussed by others. It would also probably make sense to move the entire SR discussion to a dedicated list as I suspect many wiki-research-l subscribers are not interested in following this thread. I'll also forward this to the RCom members who have been involved in SR as they will be able to make a better judgment than mine on these matters

Dario

[1] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RComDec2011 [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Sub...

...

Is such a flagging system already in place? If not, shall we start one?

This is what I imagine is what we have consensus to do - is this how it is supposed to work? Researcher jumps on Wikipedia unannounced and starts recruiting for surveys Some Wikipedian tells the researcher to submit their project for review Researcher goes to landing page and completes a form for their proposal The proposal is posted publicly Any volunteer can check the proposal to see if all fields are completed Volunteers tag the form as being completed or incomplete - no quality review Completed forms eventually get reviewed by RCom according to criteria which are currently undefined Approved projects get a template to stick on their project page. Researchers must show their research page to all research recruitment candidates, who would be able to see the completed form, the flagging by a volunteer, and the approval by RCom. The approval template would also link to more information about research on Wikipedia. Research subjects would only be able to agree to participate in research by following instructions at the bottom of the research description form, so they would see default notices like "unflagged" or "unreviewed" if no one has checked it.