Hi Amy,
That sounds like a great topic for research.
As an extension of your planned scope, I would encourage you to do some comparisons between ENWP's RfC process and those on other Wikimedia sites, as there are some noteworthy differences among sites, both among language variants of Wikipedia and among different projects.
You might also want to research how consensus has been defined over time and in different contexts, and what the outcomes have been in situations where there has been "no consensus".
Pine
On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Amy Zhang axz@mit.edu wrote:
Hi all,
We are preparing to conduct some research into the process of how Requests for Comments (RfCs) get discussed and closed. This work is further described in the following Wikimedia page: https://meta.wikimedia.o rg/wiki/Research:Discussion_summarization_and_decision_support_with_Wikum
To begin, we are planning to do a round of interviews with people who participate in RfCs in English Wikipedia, including frequent closers, infrequent closers, and people who participate in but don't close RfCs. We will be asking them about how they go about closing RfCs and their opinions on how the overall process could be improved. We are also creating a database of all the RfCs on English Wikipedia that have gone through a formal closure process and parsing their conversations.
While planning the interviews, we thought that the information that we gather could be of interest to the Wikimedia community, so we wanted to open it up and ask if there was anything you would be interested in learning about RfCs or RfC closure from people who participate in them. Also, if you know of existing work in this area, please let us know.
Thank you!
Amy
-- Amy X. Zhang | Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL | http://people.csail.mit.edu/ axz | @amyxzh _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l