Yes, indeed this is a quite interesting topic due to the methodological challenge (how to
get a representative sample for your study) and the interference with the community.
I subscribe the proposal made by Alexander and Reid, and the rest of previous comments.
Some additional context from our long past experience in this kind of initiatives with
communities driven by volunteers.
The main problem for researchers in this area is that it is:
1) Difficult to find community members willing to participate.
2) Problematic to find them without interfering the normal cruise of life in the community
(like "spamming" talk pages, no matter how good your initial intention was in
doing it).
3) Even more important, avoiding to "bother" them more than a reasonable number
of times. The first study with Apache community went on relatively well (25% or so of
answers). The second attempt failed miserably. Volunteers want to spend their time
maintaining Debian packages, dealing with Apache issues, providing new features to Gnome
desktop apps, improving Wikipedia articles, etc. They don't want to spend too much
time answering "yet another survey". And volunteer communities get burnt quite
quickly in this sense, trust me.
An example of a rather participative survey has been the Wikipedia Global Survey (as far
as it seems), but of course it took major support from WM Management Board itself. This
could not be feasible for all the cases.
Honestly, despite our numerous previous experiences, I haven't got a perfect answer
for this issues, but in the meantime, the opt-in experiments flag seems to be a good
approach to try for.
Best,
F.
--- El jue, 4/6/09, Reid Priedhorsky <reid(a)umn.edu> escribió:
De: Reid Priedhorsky <reid(a)umn.edu>
Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] WIkipedia proposal: internal IRB for research
Para: "Research into Wikimedia content and communities"
<wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Fecha: jueves, 4 junio, 2009 1:01
On 06/03/2009 05:29 PM, Alexander
Foley wrote:
I think a better course of action might be to
establish a Wikipedia
Experiments subgroup of users who opt-in to
participate in
experiments, much like what Google does with its
experimental
features. You're limiting the sample quite a
bit, and quite possibly
only getting involved or heavily involved
Wikipedia
users, but if your
core survey group is editors it would likely be
ideal.
I agree. I'd extend this notion a bit: my impression is
that most people
are more than happy to be solicited for studies (provided
it doesn't
happen too often). So I'd suggest two components:
1. The opt-in defines specifically how frequently one can
be solicited
(e.g. N times per year).
2. The opt-in is widely pushed: highly visible on account
creation, and
all existing users get one (1) invitation to opt in.
I think #2 is important because a de facto policy that only
heavily
involved Wikipedians participate in research would be
severely limiting
to the work we do.
Red
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