Gerard,
To clarify, what grosses me out ("makes me uncomfortable") is the prospect of third parties gathering and storing sensitive personal information about individual Wikipedia editors without proper oversight mechanisms. Health and medical data is one of the most sensitive kinds of individual data that exists. In the United States, as in many other countries, access to this information is heavily regulated--as it should be. Researchers who gather this kind of data should be held to a very high standard of proof that they will use the data responsibly, and take specific care to avoid information leakage. Ideally, they should be held legally responsible for proper behavior--and that depends heavily on their local jurisdiction and on their own truthfulness and transparency--things the rest of us in the movement have little control over. In my opinion, anyone who cares about both science and ethics should always err on the side of avoiding harm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report--even if that sometimes means refraining from asking research questions that have scientific merit or that could yield practical community benefit.
To your comment about Clarice Phelps, I'm not aware of this individual (or article?) and do not know what you are referring to. But I would caution you not to make public speculative statements about the mental health status of any editor, or make generalizations about the motivations or actions of all people who you believe have particular mental characteristics, based on specific incidents you have witnessed or interactions you have had. If I have misread your statement, I apologize for the error.
Best, Jonathan
On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 11:29 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, We regularly have problems with people. We have people who are banned because people think they are problematic. We have banned people who have contributed hugely to our projects. The notion that it is stigmatising is a notion whereby we wash our hands in innocence, we do not want to know.
It is one thing that you personally are grossed out but I hope you understand that given that this is an issue we need to address. It is not only people who do not care for rules, it is also the people who obsess about rules. You find it in the excessive attention for Clarice Phelps. People do get hurt, people do get traumatised because of this inattention. Thanks, GerardM
On Thu, 2 Apr 2020 at 17:58, Jonathan Morgan jmorgan@wikimedia.org wrote:
There's this study <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:The_Construction_and_Application_of...
but I don't know if it was ever completed (and as you can infer from my posts on the talkpage, I very much hope it was NOT).
In general, any kind of psychometric profiling of Wikipedia editors kind
of
grosses me out. But as an armchair psychologist myself, as well as a non-neurotypical individual, sure I'm happy to hypothesize that there are many of us in the projects. It takes a certain mindset to find the
process
of building an encyclopedia using 20-year old software paradigms to be engaging ;)
- J
On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 8:49 AM RhinosF1 - rhinosf1@gmail.com wrote:
Evening all,
I hope everyone is doing well given the crazy world we’re living in.
I was having a conversation with a few users on Discord today and we
were
wondering whether wikimedia (or users of other similiar sites would be fine) disproportinately fall into the category of having aspergers,
ADHD
and other simmilar conditions.
It would be even better if anyone knew what sort of areas these users
were
more likely to work in.
Following a chat with Issac in #wikimedia-research, I understand there isn’t much support for this kind of research as users may not want to reveal this information and there is no clear reason for collecting the information but if anyone knows of past research or has any
information,
that would be helpful.
Stay Safe, RhinosF1 -- Thanks, Samuel _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) (Uses He/Him)
*Please note that I do not expect a response from you on evenings or weekends* _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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