@Piotr
Lane, how many survey requests do you get per year? And how much time do
you spend on them?
Perhaps I got 10 survey requests, and perhaps 10 interview requests in the past year which were not obviously related to my outreach work or which I sought to have. I work in Wikipedia outreach and talk to a lot of people in that capacity too. I make myself visible.
I rarely complete surveys, and maybe have only done 5 in the last year with most or all of those being ones that I found rather than that found me.
I am contacted for being a certain kind of Wikipedian, and not for being any Wikipedian. People ask me about medicine, LGBT topics, paid editing or Wikipedian in Residence things. Unusually, I give my phone number and Skype out to a lot of people and do more Wikipedia discussion by voice than on-wiki or with typing. I do not know any other Wikipedian who says this.
Those who don't want, don't take part in the survey. where's that
disruption? What am I missing?
There is a historical precedent in human subject research which says that researchers cannot depend on their subjects to protect themselves, because this is presumed to always lead to unacceptable risk of harm to the subjects. Just saying that people can refuse surveys is out of bounds of contemporary research in western cultures. Some third party oversight from somewhere is necessary. I have no opinion about whether the Wikipedia community or WMF could provide that, but my initial thought is that if researchers follow their own institution's guidelines then things should be okay.
The most usual disruption is that the pool of researchers is large in comparison to the pool of people who could respond to surveys and interviews. Practically all researchers assume that it does not disrupt anything to ask, but there is a lot of asking and it is not obvious that Wikimedia community infrastructure should be used to serve people who are using it in ways that might be disturbing advancement of the Wikimedia mission.
@Kerry
32K active editors (> 5 edits per month) 3K very active editors (>100
edits per month).
*>*Or have I missed something here? Are researchers only interested in people who have been on Wikipedia for 10+ years with 10M edits or …?
No, you have it exactly! It is not the "Wikipedia for 10+ years with 10M edits or" that matters, but rather it is making any further distinction. A researcher who wants any demographic, like women, gay people, an ethnic minority, editors in a certain topic area, people who do a certain function like AfD, people who have had a certain problem, or many other things will cut the pool of 3000 down to 300. I would love for researchers to research those people doing 5-100 edits a month, but there is no way to reach this group and researchers rarely or never are interested in this group. Those 3000 are the ones I want to have protection because they are not a single group, but rather are lots of small groups each serving an important role. A typical survey is relevant to at most 10% of that 3000, meaning the potential research pool is rarely above 300 people. If the interviewer is imagining a research pool of 10,000 or more - which is the usual case - then they would be bold in trying to recruit and take time even though only 300 people could possibly respond. If they get 10% of the possible pool, which is an amazing response, then that could mean 30 responses and not enough to have valid results if the researcher hoped for 1% of 10,000. Also, when only 300 people do a task any time away from that is valuable time lost, and if researchers expected a larger pool, they may not be so careful with the volunteer's time. As researchers almost always come to Wikipedia completely as community outsiders, they almost always undervalue volunteer time here.
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Lane, how many survey requests do you get per year? And how much time do you spend on them?
Because myself, being in the Top 100 most active editors and thus I'd think fitting in your group of " about 30 super busy people", I get about ~2 requests per year and they cost me few minutes at most, which even being "super busy" I find I can afford.
What I'd focus with a call for the researchers (perhaps another idea for best practices) would be to ask people to do proper lit review. I don't think we have too many surveys, but I do think we have a not-too-small percentage of them pointlessly replicating prior research (as in - we probably don't need a n-th paper on Wikipedian's motivations that badly...). Of course, people who can't be bothered to to a proper lit review can't probably be bothered to find out about our best practices guides, even if we clean the mess that our research pages are currently, so... :/
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhDhttp://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKoniecznyhttp://scholar.google.com/citation...
On 7/30/2014 10:59, Lane Rasberry wrote:
Hey guys,
I posted some thoughts to my own blog and am linking to those posts below. Everything I say on my blog is captured in the summary below, so feel free to not click through.
My biggest worry is that researchers who recruit human subjects assume that there are huge numbers of Wikipedians for them to survey, and consequently, they do not need to do a lot of advance survey preparation because there is no harm from distracting Wikipedians from their usual volunteer work. This assumption is wrong because actually almost every researcher recruiting human subjects wants Wikipedians who are in very short supply. Consequently, researchers do cause harm to the community by soliciting for volunteer time, and Wikipedia community benefit is dubious when researchers do not do sufficient preparation for their work. This is not quite accurate, but if there were one message I could convey to researchers, it would be "Your research participant pool only consists of about 30 super busy people and many other volunteers greatly depend on getting their time. When you take time from a Wikipedian, you are taking that time away from other volunteers who really need it, so be respectful of your intervention in our communities."
I do not want a lot of gatekeeping between researchers and the Wikipedia community, but at the same time, researchers should take professional pride in their work and take care not to disrupt Wikimedia community activities.
< http://bluerasberry.com/2014/07/request-for-researchers-when-doing-research-...
http://bluerasberry.com/2014/07/problems-with-research-on-wikipedia/
I am still thinking about what should be done with research.
yours,
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 6:00 PM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi all,
I am a bit late in the game, but since so many questions were raised about RCom, its scope, its goals, the source of its authority etc. and I helped coordinate it in the early days I thought I’d chime in to clear some confusion.
*Is RCom an official WMF body or a group of volunteers?*
RCom was created as a volunteer body to help design policies and best practices around research on Wikimedia projects. People who joined the committee did so on a volunteer basis and with a variety of interests by responding to a call for participation issued by WMF. Despite the fact that the original initiative came from WMF, its membership almost entirely consisted of non-WMF researchers and community members (those of us who are now with Wikimedia had no affiliation with the Foundation when RCom was launched [1]). RCom work was and remains 100% volunteer-driven, even for those of us who are full-time employees of the Foundation.
*Is RCom a body regulating subject recruitment?*
No, subject recruitment was only one among many areas of interest identified by its participants [2]
*Is RCom still alive?*
RCom stopped working a while ago* as a* *group meeting on a regular basis to discuss joint initiatives*. However, it spawned a large number of initiatives and workgroups that are still alive and kicking, some of which have evolved into other projects that are now only loosely associated with RCom. These include reviewing subject recruitment requests, but also the Research Newsletter, which has been published monthly for the last 3 years; countless initiatives in the area of open access; initiatives to facilitate Wikimedia data documentation and data discoverability; hackathons and outreach events aimed at bringing together researchers and Wikimedia contributors. Subject recruitment reviews and discussions are still happening, and I believe they provide a valuable service when you consider that they are entirely run by a microscopic number of volunteers. I don’t think that the alternative between “either RCom exists and it functions effectively or reviews should immediately stop” is well framed or even desirable, for the reasons that I explain below.
*What’s the source of RCom’s authority in reviewing subject recruitment requests?*
Despite the perception that one of RCom’s duties would be to provide formal approval for research projects, it was never designed to do so and it never had the power to enforce formal review decisions. Instead, it was offered as a volunteer support service in an effort to help minimize disruption, improve the relevance of research involving Wikimedia contributors, sanity check the credentials of the researchers, create collaborations between researchers working on the same topic. The lack of community or WMF policies to back subject recruitment caused in the past few years quite some headaches, particularly in those cases in which recruitment attempts were blocked and referred to the RCom in order to “obtain formal approval”. The review process itself was meant to be as inclusive as possible and not restricted to RCom participants and researchers having their proposal reviewed were explicitly invited to address any questions or concerns raised by community members on the talk page. I totally agree that the way in which the project templates and forms were designed needs some serious overhaul to remove any indication of a binding review process or a commitment for reviews to be delivered within a fixed time frame. I cannot think of any example in which the review process discriminated some type of projects (say qualitative research) in favor of other types of research, but I am sure different research proposals attracted different levels of participation and interest in the review process. My recommendation to anyone interested in designing future subject recruitment processes is to focus on a lightweight review process open to the largest possible number of community members but backed by transparent and *enforceable* policies. It’s a really hard problem and there is simply no obvious silver bullet solution that can be found without some experimentation and fault tolerance.
*What about requests for **private data**?*
Private data and technical support requests from WMF are a different story: they were folded into the list of frequently asked questions hosted on the RCom section of Meta, but by definition they require a direct and substantial involvement from the Foundation: (1) they involve WMF as the legal entity that would be held liable for disclosing data in breech of its privacy policies and (2) they involve paid staff resources and need to be prioritized against a lot of other requests. There are now dedicated sections on private data on the Wikimedia Privacy Policy [4] and Data Retention guidelines [5]. Many people, including myself and other members of the Foundation’s Analytics team, believe that we should try and collect the minimum amount of private data that we need in order to operate and study our projects and make all those types of aggregate/sanitized data that we can retain indefinitely publicly available to everyone under open licenses. We’ve already started a process to do so and to ensure that more data (for example, data collected via site instrumentation [6]) be exposed via Labs or other APIs, in the respect of our users’ privacy.
*How can we incentivize researchers to “give back” to the community?*
In the early days we drafted a set of requirements [3] to make sure we could get back as much as possible from research involving WMF resources. It’s been hard to implement these requirements without policies to enforce them. The suggestion of having more researchers apply for a slot at the Research Showcase to present their work is an excellent idea that we should consider. In general, the Research team at WMF is always interested in hearing about incentives to drive more interest towards actionable research on Wikimedia projects.
Dario
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:Committee&oldid=20... [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WMF_support [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy [5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_retention_guidelines [6] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Schemas
On Jul 29, 2014, at 6:49 PM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.com wrote:
Either [RCOM is] functioning or its not, surely?
Well, I explained that there are functioning sub-committees still. In other words, there are initiatives that RCOM started that are alive and successful, but we no longer coordinate as a larger group. I don't know how else to explain it. I guess you could say that RCOM is still functioning and that we no longer require/engage in group meetings.
As Kerry noted earlier on, the policy as it stands [1] says that
researchers "must" obtain approval through the process described. If the wording now needs to be changed to "ought to" then surely this requires more consensus than your single message here?
That's a proposed policy. Until it is passed by consensus, the "must" is a proposed term. I think that it should be "must", but until that consensus is reached, I'll continue to say that it "ought to".
Regarding researchers stating what should be regulated, I think there is a big difference between *deciding what should be regulated* and *being involved in the discussion of *how* it should be regulated*. Hence why I welcome participation. What I'm saying is that you have a vested interest in not being regulated, but I'd still like to discuss how your activities can be regulated effectively & efficiently. Does that make sense?
b) Pine suggested a board decision on this earlier one to obtain
clarity and I supported this but it was met with silence, which is why I followed up.
I welcome you to raise it to them. I don't think it is worth their time, but they might disagree.
But what is clear is that clarification is required - especially on the
distribution of tasks between Foundation employees, the research community and Wikimedia editors. And this is *especially* true for people outside this list.
I think that the proposed policy on English Wikipedia does that quite well. That's why I directed people there. Also, again, I am not working on RCOM or subject recruitment as a WMF employee. I do this in my volunteer time. This is true of all of RCOM who happen to also be staff.
if you want process to be more clearly documented, you also have to address people like Poitr who would rather not have processes described in detail. When you guys work out how clearly you want a process to be described, please let me know. I'm tired of re-spec'ing processes. This is the third iteration.
If the policy is incorrectly described on the policy pages, then
someone from RCom (or whatever it is now called) should be the one to change this - preferably with some discussion.
Heather, that is a *proposed *policy page on English Wikipedia. It is not part of RCOM. It would render RCOM irrelevant for subject recruitment concerns. That's why I started it. I don't think that RCOM/WMF/researchers should own subject recruitment review. I think the community being studied should own it and that RCOM/WMF/researchers should participate.
Also, I am not your employee. This is my volunteer time. I don't have much of it, so I focus on keeping the system running -- and it is -- and improving the system -- which is the proposal I linked to. If you want something done and other volunteers don't have time to do it. Do it yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT
-Aaron
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:23 AM, Heather Ford hfordsa@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
RCOM is not functioning as a complete group anymore.
I'm a little confused why this wasn't made clear right at the beginning of this thread e.g. when others suggested this might be the case and you refuted them? Also, I'm not sure what 'functioning as a complete group' actually means. Either its functioning or its not, surely?
However, we split into sub-committees while we were still a
functioning group. The subject recruitment sub-committee and newsletter sub-committees are performing vital functions still.
I never stated that research recruiting needs RCOM approval. I definitely said that it "ought to" have RCOM approval.
So, does that mean that is what the policy *ought to* be now? And do you believe that this should this be the way that the policy gets decided? Because it isn't right now as far as I can see. As Kerry noted earlier on, the policy as it stands [1] says that researchers "must" obtain approval through the process described. If the wording now needs to be changed to "ought to" then surely this requires more consensus than your single message here?
re. the comment that I (and the other researchers?) on this list shouldn't be the ones to decide what the regulation should be, I disagree on two counts. a) It seems on the one hand that you want this to be "self-regulation" i.e. you invited researchers on this list to join R-COM at the beginning of this thread, but that you don't think that the researchers here should be able to determine what to regulate. I know that you're looking for an inclusive process but you can't have it both ways: if we are going to help regulate, then we need to at least help decide how to regulate. b) Pine suggested a board decision on this earlier one to obtain clarity and I supported this but it was met with silence, which is why I followed up.
There are also more than two "review coordinators" (not not
"reviewers") -- it's just that DarTar and I have accepted the burden of distributing work. When people are busy, we often coordinate the reviews ourselves.
I can understand your frustration; I really can! I know that you've done a lot of really great, prior work on this and I don't think any of us are saying that we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what is clear is that clarification is required - especially on the distribution of tasks between Foundation employees, the research community and Wikimedia editors. And this is *especially* true for people outside this list.
I welcome your edits to make it clear that review is optional. As you might imagine, I have plenty of work to do and I appreciate your good-faith collaboration on improving our research documentation.
I'm frustrated by this response. If the policy is incorrectly described on the policy pages, then someone from RCom (or whatever it is now called) should be the one to change this - preferably with some discussion. I find it frustrating that WMF employees are often the ones who make the final policy pronouncements but then tell others to implement it. And if we don't do the work, then we're apparently not assuming good faith.
This is a great opportunity to rejuvenate the process; hopefully it will eventually be seen that way :)
Best, Heather.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_recruitment
-Aaron
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