[rant - tl;dr]

Ugh, another new instruction creep with an anti-research bent to boot. Thanks, Aaron, for linking it here, as this is the first time I've heard of this - now I actually get to oppose this on record before this is archived :>

That was first third of the problem with RCOM in the first place: next to nobody knew (or knows) about it. When we still get many studies about Wikipedia who clearly display the fact that the researchers fail at basic lit review not citing any prior studies, to expect that most would try to (and be able to) find such pages is nothing but an exercise in bureaucratizing the project. The second third of the problem is that all such policies, if implemented, would make research much more difficult; anytime you add some reviewers to the mix, you add the risk of having good project rejected because of reviewers IDONTLIKEIT, and with the new proposal idea of letting complete amateurs be the reviewers... Fortunately, this doesn't fix the third compound problem of RCOM, which is that a) it had no real power to enforce anything it required and b) next to nobody wanted to invest time into doing the work, because it's a waste of time: non-productive work (not contributing to building an encyclopedia) that very, very few people in our community care about., and that adds an unimportant line to one's professional CV. RCOM is dying of inactivity and of being not needed, we should officially retire it instead of trying to clone it on Wikipedia.

[/rant]

Don't get me wrong, at first RCOM was a nice and noble idea. A guideline page for researchers is helpful, I do like the idea of trying to list and categorize ongoing research (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects), it provides some useful links to data, FAQ and such. However, as in many other places on Wikipedia, this turned into an unnecessary instruction creep, which I very strongly oppose .

A while ago I've contributed to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ethically_researching_Wikipedia
It's a simple page, the gist of which is that any professional scholar who is researching Wikipedia should already be familiar with their professional codes of ethics, which in turn are perfectly sufficient to protect Wikipedia and its volunteers and users from any abuses. It also doesn't require any policing from the community outside normal scope. Any (extremely rare - can anyone even cite one?) disruptive experiments which breach the professional codes of ethics in the first place should result in bans and WMF official complains. Outside that, Wikipedians can deal with survey/interview requests like everyone else - ignore them if they don't like them. No special body to police researchers is needed. No approval body is needed for anything outside WMF grants, which WMF and/or the existing grant structure can handle.

What we need is for someone to review all research-related pages on Wikipedia and meta, merge any similar ones, and that's it. In other words, we need to condolence and organize the sprawl mess that research pages have become, not to add to them.

--

Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus

On 7/17/2014 05:58, Aaron Halfaker wrote: