-- Brendan O'Connor - http://anyall.org
On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Aaron Halfaker half0032@umn.edu wrote:
This proposal isn't really about the merits of any particular study. I only offered a link to the discussions about my most recent user study because I felt it was a good example of push-back from Wikipedia editors.
For a better view of the *initial* troubles with the first failed study, see Katherine's talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:KatherinePanciera. I'm most concerned about what happen in that study. After Katherine asked for Wikipedia users to participate simply by taking a survey, her account was nominated for deletion for allegedly violating an obscure policy that did not match he actions. Katherine had no policy to cite in order to defend herself. For simply asking people to participate in a survey, her account was nearly banned.
Ah OK. It was hard to figure out what the story was based on the links. Thanks for the summary, it makes it clearer.
I'd suggest you have a read through the proposal (it is actually quite
small) in order to more clearly understand the problem we wish to solve. The first section is devoted to just that.
Just a friendly recommendation -- to make the proposal clearer, you should point out reasons people might object to wikipedia research - "it's canvassing", confusion between academic and industrial research, etc.
For the types of research I think of when I think of Wikipedia, I usually think of read-only research so these scenarios didn't occur to me at all. I'm sure you folks in the GroupLens group are quite familiar with a certain set of issues.
Brendan