Just saying here what I already put on the Talk page:
I am a little bothered by the opening sentence "This page documents the process that researchers must follow before asking Wikipedia contributors to participate in research studies such as surveys, interviews and experiments."
WMF does not "own" me as a contributor; it does not decide who can and cannot recruit me for whatever purposes. What WMF does own is its communication channels to me as a contributor and WMF has a right to control what occurs on those channels. Also I think WMF probably should be concerned about both its readers and its contributors being recruited through its channels (as either might be being recruited). I think this distinction should be made, e.g.
"This page documents the process that researchers must follow if they wish to use Wikipedia's (WMF's?) communication channels to recruit people to participate in research studies such as surveys, interviews and experiments. Communication channels include its mailing lists, its Project pages, Talk pages, and User Talk pages [and whatever else I've forgotten]."
If researchers want to recruit WPians via non-WMF means, I don’t think it’s any business of WMF’s. An example might be a researcher who wanted to contact WPians via chapters or thorgs; I would leave it for the chapter/thorg to decide if they wanted to assist the researcher via their communication channels.
Of course, the practical reality of it is that some researchers (oblivious of WMF’s concerns in relation to recruitment of WPians to research projects) will simply use WMF’s channels without asking nicely first. Obviously we can remove such requests on-wiki and follow up any email requests with the commentary that this was not an approved request. In my category of [whatever else I’ve forgotten], I guess there are things like Facebook groups and any other social media presence.
Also to be practical, if WMF is to have a process to vet research surveys, I think it has to be sufficiently fast and not be overly demanding to avoid the possibility of the researcher giving up (“too hard to deal with these people”) and simply spamming email, project pages, social media in the hope of recruiting some participants regardless. That is, if we make it too slow/hard to do the right thing, we effectively encourage doing the wrong thing. Also, what value-add can we give them to reward those who do the right thing? It’s nice to have a carrot as well as a stick when it comes to onerous processes J
Because of the criticism of “not giving back”, could we perhaps do things to try to make the researcher feel part of the community to make “giving back” more likely? For example, could we give them a slot every now and again to talk about their project in the R&D Showcase? Encourage them to be on this mailing list. Are we at a point where it might make sense to organise a Wikipedia research conference to help build a research community? Just thinking aloud here …
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Halfaker
Sent: Thursday, 17 July 2014 6:59 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] discussion about wikipedia surveys
RCOM review is still alive and looking for new reviewers (really, coordinators). Researchers can be directed to me or Dario (dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org) to be assigned a reviewer. There is also a proposed policy on enwiki that could use some eyeballs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Research_recruitment
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
phoebe ayers, 16/07/2014 19:21:
> (Personally, I think the answer should be to resuscitate RCOM, but
> that's easy to say and harder to do!)IMHO in the meanwhile the most useful thing folks can do is subscribing
to the feed of new research pages:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&feed=atom&hidebots=1&hideredirs=1&limit=500&offset=&namespace=202>
It's easier to build a functioning RCOM out of an active community of
"reviewers", than the other way round.
Nemo
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